by Tim Jeal
‘To collect evidence of bribery?’
‘No chance of that,’ replied Magnus wryly. ‘Braithwaite will probably pay the money to a tradesman who’s recently worked for him; it’ll look like an ordinary payment in his books. This honest broker will then disperse it among the voters for a commission. Nobody’ll be able to prove a thing.’
‘So what do you do? You can’t intend to outbid Braithwaite.’
‘I don’t, but I’m going to give that impression. In fact I’ve arranged to meet our six rogues on Nomination Day. I’ll have witnesses with me, and, as soon as they’ve pocketed the bribe, I’ll get it back by threatening to denounce them to Braithwaite for trying to cheat him … unless of course they return my money and agree to abstain in the voting.’
Impressed for a moment, Tom thought quickly, determined that Crawford was going to have no chance to think him naïve. The flaw seemed so glaring, when he thought of it, that Tom hesitated in case he had missed the point. Then he said quietly:
‘But they’ll go straight to Braithwaite themselves, tell him that the opposition has tried to bribe them but backed down. Then they’ll swear that, whatever’s said, their votes are his.’
Magnus nodded eager assent.
‘Quite true, Mr Strickland.’ He came up to him and murmured: ‘But suppose one of my witnesses is a man whose word Braithwaite would be sure to trust … a man, for example, dependent on his patronage; don’t you think that might impress our six gentlemen? They’d know Braithwaite would believe such a man’s word rather than their own.’
Tom’s heart was beating fast now that he knew what Crawford wanted. He admired the man’s skill for almost making it seem that he had suggested his own participation. He smiled at Magnus, who was watching him anxiously.
‘When do we meet them?’ he asked, feeling his cheeks tingle and a surprising constriction in his throat.
‘Nomination Day. I’ll write with the time and place.’
The understated calmness of this reaction annoyed Tom.
‘You’re very confident, Mr Crawford,’ he said with a trace of bitterness.
‘Why not? They’ll know better than to touch us; I’ll have left an excellent account of our movements with those who’ll know how to avenge any insult. Your best protection will be some papers connecting you with Braithwaite.’
‘Are you very used to people doing what you want?’
Magnus suddenly looked at Tom with such frankness and sympathy that he forgot his resentment.
‘By no means. Surely you don’t think I’ve done this before? Isn’t that the attraction; a new taste, a new drink? I’m just as worried as you are.’
‘Now you’re making fun of me,’ laughed Tom.
‘Really I’m not; but I had to seem certain, didn’t I? Otherwise why should you have agreed? You like to seem persuadable but your questions were sharp enough.’
‘Now you’re just making sure I won’t change my mind.’
Magnus lowered his eyes in a parody of being shocked.
‘Isn’t that just a little cynical of you, Mr Strickland?’
As Tom caught the humorous sparkle in Crawford’s eyes, he could not understand how he had ever thought him cold and forbidding. The thought that he was part of a plot to balk Joseph Braithwaite no longer struck Tom as frightening but as ludicrously funny. Wanting to laugh, he controlled himself and said:
‘What if word gets back to Braithwaite about my part in this?’
‘It won’t, but if it does, all you have to do is play the loyal employee who joined the conspirators only to be able to reveal their baseness to his master.’
‘How easy,’ replied Tom, with a disdainful toss of the head.
‘If you persuaded me to trust you, surely you can do the same with Braithwaite?’
They both laughed, and Magnus moved towards the door. As he was leaving, Tom caught sight of a pile of printed hand-bills.
LORD GOODCHILD
WISHES IT TO BE KNOWN
THAT WHEREVER HIS NAME IS USED
TO BIAS VOTERS
IN MR BRAITHWAITE’S FAVOUR,
IT WILL BE DONE
WITHOUT HIS LORDSHIP’S
AUTHORITY AND CONSENT.
Underneath appeared the name of a solicitor to give the spurious document greater authenticity. Magnus picked up one of the bills and shook his head.
‘A little unethical perhaps. I’ll have it stuck up all over town a couple of nights before polling. Braithwaite won’t have much time to print a denial.’
‘Who’s going to believe it?’
‘Fools, Mr Strickland, but doubtless Rigton Bridge has its share.’ Magnus opened the door and ushered Tom through the office. They paused on the dark landing and shook hands.
‘Till Nomination Day, Mr Strickland.’
‘Indeed, Mr Crawford.’
Outside in the smoke-laden twilight Tom listened to the distant strains of an organ-grinder for a moment, and then, with a shrug of the shoulders, began to walk. It was impossible, absurd, fantastic and yet it had happened. He Thomas Strickland had made a decision which might decide the election. He thought of the way Goodchild had brushed him aside in the hall at Hanley Park and how George Braithwaite always counted on his docile agreement. If Crawford’s plan worked, it would be a pity that those who suffered by it should never know the means of their discomfiture. As he passed the street market in Store Street, he changed his mind. To share that knowledge as a secret with Crawford would be better still; and they would never know. A moment later he realised that he had been walking in the muddiest part of the street without noticing.
9
For several weeks, Lord Goodchild had dreaded the steady approach of the day appointed for the nomination of candidates; but, now that the moment had actually come, he felt much calmer than he had expected; calm enough in fact to walk through the massive crowd assembled in the market square. A fine driving rain, blown by a gusty wind, made the profusion of party flags and banners around him, flap and fill like carelessly furled sails in a crowded harbour. In the centre stood the sturdy wooden platform of the hustings from which he would soon be obliged to propose Joseph Braithwaite.
Goodchild was well aware of the deep resentment which his support of the mill-owner’s candidature had occasioned among the local gentry. Because the Tories were so closely associated with agricultural and landed interests, very few manufacturers had sought adoption as Tory candidates in the past. But with the repeal of the Corn Laws, it had seemed obvious to Goodchild that the principal obstacle to an alliance between the urban factory-owner and the rural landowner had been removed. The manufacturers had wanted cheaper bread to keep down wages and, this aim achieved, could surely be relied upon to oppose further reforms with die-hard conservative vigour. The futility of agricultural opposition to the nation’s manifest destiny as the workshop of the world, had been an argument often used by his lordship in persuading his tenant farmers to pledge their votes to Braithwaite. Fortunately, few of them had known about his indebtedness to the manufacturer.
On Nomination Day there was never any polling, only formal speeches by the candidates and their proposers and then, after a farcical ‘show of hands’ – meaningless because those showing their preference in this way were rarely qualified voters – the day of the actual poll would be announced, in this case for the following week. The only satisfaction Lord Goodchild derived from the proceedings was that they would cost Braithwaite the two hundred or so pounds needed to pay and transport, from neighbouring villages, a body of men large enough to give him token support in the square and to prevent an assault on the hustings.
Goodchild had never been unhappy in crowds. The garish bandana headscarves of the mill girls, the small boys clambering up lamp-posts, and the cries of the hot-potato sellers, brought to mind other large gatherings, like those at the race-course rails or at the prize fights of his youth. That there were whores and pickpockets about, he had no doubt, but, taking such things for granted, he wa
s neither surprised nor affronted. Never having doubted his own position, he had always been comparatively unmoved by popular agitation. And yet this crowd was different from any he had seen in recent years. He did not expect to be liked by working people, but he was surprised to be hated and although nobody had struck him, he noticed little of the mixture of deference and mild resentment to which he was accustomed. Instead the strike and the suppression of the riots had produced the same smouldering anger he remembered from the worst period of the Chartist troubles. Not often given to feeling guilty, the discomforting thought still occurred to Goodchild, that if he had been truer to his obligations and less attentive to his pleasures, Braithwaite would not have gained his present provocative ascendancy. Goodchild had not raised his rents for a decade, but gangs of boys still weeded his fields for less than Braithwaite paid his child piecers. His lordship’s disquieting sense of failure however owed less to a humanitarian’s bad conscience over his omissions, than to the realisation that if he, and others of his caste, had done more to defend the interests of the people, the rapid encroachments of the new plutocracy would have been checked.
A few yards to his right the crowd was denser where a juggler was performing, spinning two basins, one above the other, on the top of a long cane. The man’s silver satin coat and sequinned trousers were soaked by the rain, and his gilded slippers were splattered with mud. A barefooted boy, with a running sore under an eye, was collecting coins in a wooden bowl. Goodchild tossed in a gold sovereign and strode off at once so he did not hear the amazed gratitude of the recipient.
When he reached the Swan, Braithwaite’s headquarters, he saw Joseph himself talking to the High Sheriff and the Returning Officer in the entrance hall. He also noticed two Light Dragoon troopers doing sentry duty at the door. There would be other soldiers in the hotel kept tactfully out of sight. Goodchild was thankful that as yet his own regiment had not been sent for. The town’s chief magistrate, the Reverend Francis St Clare, came up to him with a gravely bowed bald head.
‘An ugly mob, my lord, and painfully agitated.’
Goodchild glanced out at the line of special constables keeping the crowd back from the front of the hotel with enthusiastic use of their staves and truncheons. He looked back at St Clare’s soft and pudgy face that reminded him only of a fat schoolboy suddenly overtaken by middle-age before his beard had had time to grow. He smiled reassuringly.
‘Ugly? Surely not. Excited perhaps, but not ill-disposed.’
Seconds later a stone crashed through the window of the adjoining dining room.
‘Not ugly, my lord?’ asked St Clare quizzically. Goodchild laughed easily.
‘What would Nomination Day be without a few broken heads and windows? An immemorial custom, Mr St Clare.’
‘Perhaps you would have been less sanguine had your lordship been in the Under Sheriff’s chaise when the door was torn off and horse soil thrown in.’
‘I would have resented stones and bottles more. Dung has the merit of softness.’ He paused and went on in a more serious manner: ‘I have walked in the crowd….’
‘My lord?’ St Clare’s amazement was not feigned.
‘And I found them sullen but peaceable. Should the High Sheriff or the Mayor ask you to read the Riot Act, I would advise refusal unless the hustings are in danger.’ From the corner of his eye, Goodchild saw Joseph coming towards him. Braithwaite’s face was flushed, and although he seemed calm and composed, Goodchild guessed that he owed some of his courage to the hotel’s brandy. The mill-owner took his proposer’s arm.
‘Harry, I see you’ve been acting the Christian among the lions or perhaps I should reverse the order, only there seems little sanctity out there.’ He let out his strange high-pitched laugh, which pained Goodchild almost more than the man’s use of his Christian name. Goodchild felt the pressure of the hand on his arm tighten and saw the mill-owner’s face darken. ‘There’s deception afoot, Harry – a scheme to poach our votes. But they’ll not make fools of us, not that way, I tell you.’
Goodchild was about to make an appropriate reply when the band, which was to lead Braithwaite’s procession to the hustings, launched into ‘See the Conquering Hero’. From the efforts being made by the special constables to clear a path through the crowd, Goodchild judged that their departure for the centre of the square must be imminent.
Five minutes later, after some irksome jostling and jeering, both Goodchild and Braithwaite, and the Liberal candidate and his proposer, took their places on the platform, next to the High Sheriff and the Town Clerk. The Returning Officer stepped forward and appealed for silence.
‘I have received Her Majesty’s writ for the election of a new member for the borough of Rigton Bridge in the Eastern Division of the County and have appointed today for the nomination. I must beg that both sides are heard with considerate attention and true English impartiality and must remind….’
Goodchild listened to very little of this preliminary address but waited patiently for it to finish. As soon as it did, he moved forward to the rail to make his speech proposing Braithwaite and extolling his virtues. He was greeted by a deafening roar of opposition. He had expected hissing and groaning but this full-throated howl of derision took him by surprise. Nevertheless he began his speech calmly, aware that he was inaudible even to those nearest him. Within seconds eggs and rotten vegetables were raining down on the hustings. A bag filled with water burst against his chest and when he was subsequently hit with flour, he began to resemble a snowman in a thaw. He saw a man below him in the crowd piss into a bottle and hurl it up at the platform, but he finished his speech without being hit by anything more substantial than a potato; then, taking Braithwaite by the arm, he led him forward, as a king might present his son and heir to his loyal subjects; but there were no acclamations for the prince of commerce. Joseph had barely opened his mouth before he was hit on the cheek by a piece of glass. The wound was not deep but bled profusely. The Liberal candidate vainly appealed to the crowd to hear his rival, while Braithwaite glared at his attackers with a scornful sneer made more grotesque by the blood which streaked his face and shirt-front. Goodchild was impressed that Joseph did not for a moment leave the front of the platform.
By the time the Liberal and his proposer had had their say too, the crowd was more peaceable, and the ‘show of hands’, although overwhelmingly against the Tory, provoked no further violence. The Returning Officer announced the poll for the following Tuesday and the proceedings were at an end.
Braithwaite was trembling with suppressed rage but Goodchild and most of the others were none-the-less relieved that no worse trouble had occurred. Their most fervent hope was that Polling Day itself might pass as uneventfully.
*
As Tom Strickland entered the labyrinth of streets and alleys south of Market Street on his way to meet Magnus Crawford, his former mood of light-hearted adventure had long since been dispelled by the violent scenes he had witnessed earlier near the hustings. A man like Crawford, who had suppressed a native rebellion, might take angry mobs for granted but to Tom, in spite of his far from sheltered childhood, the rumbling fury of that vast crowd with its threat of ungovernable power had been a chastening spectacle. The idea that he and Crawford, or for that matter Braithwaite himself, could influence such a swelling tide of disaffection, now seemed arrogant and unreal. Not even the great institutions of state could survive if cut off from the mass of the people. And yet the Chártists had been defeated and the vast majority of the people was still unrepresented in Parliament. Tom was in an anxious and thoughtful mood as he picked his way towards the river. Could Crawford be involving himself for no better reason than a craving for new experience, as he had claimed? He had spoken of atonement too, and hatred of Braithwaite’s methods; but which was the truth? And through what misguided romanticism, Tom wondered, had he committed himself? Because of reckless courage at the hazard table, and the intangible attraction of the man’s presence, with his strange shifts from melanch
oly to gaiety, from indifference to ardent involvement? Perhaps it had been no more than an artist’s habitual feelings of inadequacy in the face of men of action. He smiled disdainfully at the idea, but could not utterly dismiss it.
The note Crawford had sent him, two days after their meeting, had been brief and factual. Because Braithwaite’s agents were by now likely to be watching the offices of the Independent, Magnus had asked Tom to meet him by the old pack-horse bridge on the river. From there, they would go by a circuitous route to the small flint-glass factory where the meeting with the new voters’ representatives was to take place. Tom was not to come in at once but was to remain in an adjacent timber yard midway between the gas-works and the glass factory. He would be joined there by the Liberal agent, who would have set out separately for the rendezvous, to split up and confuse possible pursuers, and would have with him half-a-dozen labourers, hired in case of trouble. Magnus would go on alone to the meeting-place, followed at a distance by the boy Moggs. If Crawford suspected no foul play, he would send back Moggs to summon Tom and the others from the timber yard.
It being Nomination Day, Tom was jostled as he walked by large numbers of men and women, who would otherwise have been at work. Groups were lounging at street corners and outside taprooms from which floated the sound of singing and the music of pianos and seraphines. The next street he passed along was swarming with drunken workmen ejected from a nearby gin-shop, and with young mill girls and piecers shouting and playing ‘kiss in the ring’. Closer to the river the dark and crowded back-streets opened out into wide muddy tracts of undeveloped waste ground, trampled bare of grass and covered with piles of blackened bricks, ash-pits and mounds of decaying rubbish. Tom saw some pigs rooting about for rotting vegetables and so saving their owners the expense of feeding them. The desolation, the drizzle and the smoky greyness of the sky, which washed out all colours brighter than brown and dirty ochre, filled Tom with a leaden numbness – sharpening to active pain when he saw, outside a small coarse thread mill, a young mother squatting on the step suckling a baby. The infant had been brought to the factory by a child-minder, herself no more than eight or nine years old. The woman seemed oblivious of the fine steady rain and the heavy drips falling from the porch.
