The young ladies drop their eyes and turn away quickly. After a few seconds, you hear a shriek of laughter.
By the time you reached Westminster, traffic in the streets has slowed to a crawl as cabs and buses come to a full stop so their drivers and passengers can take a good, long look at the poor women walking en masse toward parliament, just as if they have a right to.
Perhaps if you weren’t in so much pain, you tell yourself, you could be as brave as Jenny, old Jenny Rotlegh, forty if she’s a day, and bald as an egg from years of carrying wooden pallets on her head. Jenny sweeps off her bonnet right then and there, in front of the three MPs who had received your delegation.
“Look,” she says. “Look what they done to me! Ain’t that worth more ’n four shillings a week, less fines?”
You listen to the gasps from the fine gentlemen and wonder if you should undo your scarf and expose what remains of your blackened jaw, and the line of sores reaching now up to your temples. You come as near as raising your hand to the scarf around your throat and taking one of the ends in your fingers. You untuck it and pause, thinking of the gentlemen staring at your melting face.
Jenny is an object of pity, an exemplar of abused and mistreated femininity.
But you have become a monster.
There is a difference between shocked pity and horrified disgust. It is human nature to turn away from the latter. You tighten the scarf and retie the knot, more tightly than before.
Annie Besant wasn’t the only established activist late to the party. There was also the London Trades Council, the last leading bastion of craft unionism, which had previously turned up its nose at unskilled laborers. The council met with a delegation of matchwomen. Perhaps out of the desire to retain its preeminent place as the voice of the urban worker, perhaps out of a paternalistic sense of noblesse oblige, perhaps even out of a genuine sense of fellow feeling and solidarity, the LTC offered to send a delegation of workmen to negotiate a settlement agreeable to both parties.
The firm received the overture genteelly, which must have made it all the more humiliating when that deputation returned empty-handed. The men reported only that Bryant and May were willing to allow most of the strikers to resume their old places, if they returned immediately, while reserving the right to refuse reemployment to the women they termed “the ringleaders.”
The strikers didn’t bother to send a reply.
The evening after the meeting with the MPs, your Nan asks you to lay your head on her lap. When you do, she rests her hand on your hair.
“You’re angry with me, a cushla,” she says.
You say nothing. You watch your words more carefully than your sisters watch their farthings now that you slough off flesh with every motion of your mouth.
“Well, you’ve a right,” she continues. When you remain silent, she sighs and is quiet herself for a while. After some minutes drift by, she draws breath to begin again.
“The strike will end,” she says conversationally. “I seen it.” This time she doesn’t bother to pause for responses you will not give. “But you won’t see it. You’ll die first. I seen that, too.”
Sooner’s better than later, you think dully, and wonder if she’ll tell you how long the strike will last, and if any of you will have jobs by the time it is over. You’d like to know that Annie won’t starve, at least. If your Nan really does have any sight at all, if she hasn’t been lying about everything, all this time. If she isn’t just some crazy ould biddy.
“You won’t see the end of this strike,” she repeats. “Not unless I help you out. And I figure, I figure, I owe you at least that much.” You gently take her hand from your head and sit up, moving slowly, the way you have been for a while now. You hold her rough hand between two of yours, and you know for sure now, her mind is broken and gone, and she’ll never see Ireland again.
She pulls her hand away from you irritably, as though she can hear your thoughts, and swats at you.
“Not a crazy ould one,” she says. “Not like my own gran, there was madness for you, if that’s what you’re thinking. A life, it’s like a flame, y’see, a candle flame. An’ if I put that flame into a real flame, a real candle, well, you’ll keep right on living as long as that candle keeps burning.
“And a candle held in the left hand of a hanged man, that candle, it can’t go out. You can’t put that out with wind nor water nor snuff it with yer fingers. Only good white milk can put out a Hand o’ Glory.
“I can do that fer you,” she says. “I can do it, if yeh can bring me what I need. It won’t exactly be living, more sort of not dyin’. But I don’t know that what yeh’re doing now is living, so much, either.”
You say nothing once more, but this time more out of shock than deliberately.
“I’ll give you a list,” she says.
“Hand of a dead man?” you manage to slur.
“Hanged,” she corrects you. “Left hand of a hanged man. Or woman’ll do as well, o’ course. Dunno how we’ll get that one. We’re neither of us well enough for grave robbing. But we’ll manage.”
After a doubtful pause, she repeats, “We’ll manage.
“And those pieces of your jawbone that keep fallin’ off. Start saving ’em.”
Here are some of the reasons given by Bryant and May for fines taken g from their workers’ pay packets:
—dirty feet (3d.)
—ground under bench left untidy (3d.)
—putting burnt-out matches on the bench (ls.)
—talking (amount not specified)
—lateness, for which the worker was then shut out for half the day (5d.)
Here are deductions regularly taken from the matchwomen’s pay packets:
—6d. for brushes to clean the machines (every six months)
—3d. to pay for children to fetch packing paper (weekly)
—2d. to pay the packer who books the number of packages (weekly)
—6d. to pay for stamps, to stamp the packages (weekly
—ld. to pay for children to fetch and carry for the box-fillers (weekly)
Bryant and May employed no children to fetch and carry for the box-fillers. The box-fillers fetched and carried for themselves.
Nan says that you don’t have the time to make a tallow dip. You wonder how much time you do have, as you collect what she told you to, and if it’s worth living as you do now until the strike is over and broken.
Perhaps it would be better to go now, while the girls are still going strong, fuelled by high hopes.
But love is a hard habit to break, so you do as she tells you, scavenging strips of paper, a wide-mouth jar, and a length of wire from the trash heaps, and stopping at the butcher’s for what lumps of pork fat he’ll give you for your pennies. You’ve found that shopkeepers give you better prices these days. Perhaps they feel sorry for you.
Perhaps they just want you out of the shop as quickly as possible, so you don’t scare off custom.
Either way is fine by you, as long as you can walk away with all the pork fat you need, which isn’t much. You bring your parcels home to your Nan and lay them at her feet, like offerings.
What you do next isn’t hard; you’ve made paper wicks before, rendered pork fat before, and it stinks, but it doesn’t stink as badly as you do. While you do these things, your Nan takes the pieces of your jawbone that you’ve saved and grinds them into a fine powder, using a mortar and pestle. They crumble so easily.
Dust to dust.
While you stir the melted fat, your Nan leans over from her chair by the fire and tips the dust of your bones into the small pot. Then she slices across the veins of your forearm with an old knife. Straining against her arthritic knuckles, she squeezes and massages your arm to get as much of your blood into the mix as she can.
After you give the pot a few more stirs, the tallow looks no different from any other bit of tallow you’ve ever seen, grubby and nasty, and smells no different either, rank and putrid. You pour it into the glass jar, watching it
pool and pile up around the paper wick held stiff by the scavenged wire.
While you scrub out the pot, your Nan mutters some Irish over the makeshift candle and sets it aside to harden.
“It’s a good thing we neither of us eat much,” she says to you. “With neither of us bringing anything in.”
You nod. After a minute, you ask her the same thing you did the previous evening.
“Hand of a hanged man?” you force out.
She seems troubled, but she pats your hand. “Leave that to me,” she says, and then again, more slowly, “leave that to me.”
Before you sleep that night, she whispers in your ear, “I’m goin’ out tonight. You be in the cemetery. The unconsecrated ground, an hour before dawn. Bring the small axe and the candle. And a few matches, o’ course.”
Your sleep has been unquiet for a long time now, with the effect that you find it harder and harder to rouse yourself. This is probably because you are dying.
Whatever the reason, by the time you force yourself fully awake, it’s long past when you should have left for Bow Cemetery. On your way, you wonder anxiously if you’ll be there in time. However it is that your Nan plans to find you a hanged man, you want the cover of darkness.
You don’t know the way as well as you do to the churchyard at Saints Michael and Mary on Commercial Road, the Catholic church not yet built when your Nan came over. You’ve been there plenty, standing by the gravesides of the very young, the very old, and all between.
But your Nan wouldn’t dig up a good Catholic.
Surely she didn’t have the strength to dig up anybody else, either, come to that. And she didn’t tell you to bring a shovel.
It’s summer, and small pink flowers dot the ground of the graveyard.
They remind you of the morning that an anonymous benefactor sent a cartload of pink roses down to all the girls on the picket, to wear as badges. That morning, the fragrance of roses had blotted out even the stench you did your best to trap in the folds of your scarf. For that one morning, the scent of roses surrounded you, and you let yourself pretend that you weren’t rotting away, like the corpses interred in the ground beneath your feet.
The unconsecrated ground is a newer part of the graveyard, and it holds unbaptized babies, suicides, and those of strange and foreign faiths, or perhaps even no faith at all.
But they all rot in the same way, you figure, ’cause the worms probably don’t know the difference.
Or maybe they do. Maybe they feel a tingle of the divine wind round them as they cross from unconsecrated to holy soil, and the whisper of loss and chilly despair as they pass back the other way.
You spot your Nan’s figure swaying by an oak tree. That’s to be expected, of course, the swaying, but she seems somehow to be taller than you think of her being, and she’s not holding her stick.
When you draw nearer, you see your Nan’s stick lying on the ground where she dropped it, next to the lidded milk pail and near the kicked-over step stool, all of which she must have dragged out to the cemetery last night. Nan herself sways and twists gently, her feet a foot and a half off the ground, one end of a stout rope around her neck, the other tied to a branch over your head, a branch high enough to keep her feet from the ground, but low enough that she could reach it from the step stool.
She rocks back and forth, and you watch her, waiting for the tears to come. They don’t, though, perhaps because there’s nothing left inside you at all.
“Oh, Nan,” you whisper, and you don’t even feel the pain as what remains of your jaw and tongue move clumsily.
You sit just near her swaying feet and begin to feel a certain leaden weight in your limbs, beginning at your hands and feet, and creeping upward. It is death come for you, you know. As you decide to sit calmly and wait for the leaden feeling to spread, a gust of wind sets your Nan’s corpse to swinging violently. You look up at her contorted face.
It is less repellent than you imagine your own to be.
You get to your feet, straighten the stool, and pick up the axe, so your Nan, who had loved you enough to lie to you, enough to relinquish her place in paradise and her chance to see her lost babbies again, shouldn’t have done so for nothing at all.
For isn’t suicide a mortal sin?
Using the axe, you cut her down and lay the body on the ground, her left arm stretched to the side. And as the sun rises, you bring the axe down on her left wrist.
You move mechanically, so as not to waste a moment, and in any case, the cool, rough skin of your Nan’s hand is less horrifying than the dead flesh of your face and neck. You close her fingers around the candle, and they grip it tightly, as if your Nan is still there, holding on to what remains of your life for all she is worth.
You take a match from your pocket and strike it against the handle of the axe. It flares up, and for a moment the familiar smell of white phosphorus hovers in the air.
You hide the axe in the bushes on the grounds of the cemetery and walk home carrying the corpse, the burning candle protected by her good left hand hidden in the lidded milk pail dangling from your arm.
The old lady is heavy, so much heavier than she had seemed when she was alive. She’d become small and frail, but the body that lies in your arms is heavy as sin.
Even in the East End, people do not usually stroll out just after dawn carrying a corpse. Heads turn as you go, and your neighbors recognize you, recognize your Nan. Nobody speaks.
You lay your Nan’s body down in the room you shared with her and your sister, her husband, and their kiddies, and then you rouse the rest of the family.
You say little when they ask what happened. But then, you say very little these days anyway. They assume that your Nan’s hand was missing when you found her.
At least, you think they do. You do catch Janey looking at you intently, her brow wrinkled, her head tilted to one side, a bit suspicious-like, and for a minute she looks so much like your late mother, with her constant expression of worry, that it takes your breath away.
Or it would.
You realize that you are no longer breathing. You bring your fingers to your throat, pushing through the layers of your scarf, and feel for a pulse.
You find none.
Later, in private, you peer into the milk pail, and the candle your Nan made and holds is still burning.
Early in the afternoon, you go back for the axe.
Bryant and May gave in, just over two weeks after the walkout. They gave in so quickly and so completely that with the benefit of historical hindsight, one wonders if the matchwomen should have demanded more. On July 18, 1888, Bryant and May acceded to every one of the strikers’ terms.
—The firm agreed to recognize the newly formed Union of Women Matchmakers, the largest union of women and girls in England.
—The firm agreed to abolish all fines.
—The firm agreed to abolish all deductions.
—Matchworkers could take any and all problems directly to the managing director of the firm rather than having to go through the foremen.
—The firm agreed to provide a room for eating lunch separate and apart from the working rooms.
This last item was so that the matchwomen could eat without white phosphorous settling onto their food and from there making its way into their teeth.
It starts with a toothache, after all.
On August 14, 1889, just over a year after the matchwomen’s victory, a group of London dockworkers walked off the job. These workers were mainly Irishmen: the husbands, sons, brothers, and sweethearts of the matchwomen of the East End. Within two days, twenty-five hundred men had turned out, demanding a wage of 6d. an hour, a penny more than they had been earning. Solidarity with the dockworkers spread across London. Black workers, usually brought in as cheap replacement labor, refused to scab. Jewish tailors went out. Hyde Park played host to a rally of one hundred thousand people, serenaded by bands playing “The Marseillaise.”
By the end of August, over one hundred thirty th
ousand workers were out on strike, and the families that were making do without their men’s wages were withholding rent.
The strike lasted a month, and the dockworkers won nearly all they asked for. Years later, historians refer to the Great Dock Strike of 1889 as the beginning of the militant New Unionism: the organization of unskilled and industrial labor that swept Britain and replaced the old craft union model. By the end of 1890, almost two million of Britain’s workers held a union card.
John Burns, one of the dockworkers’ great leaders, spoke out at rallies, urging solidarity in the face of the starvation that threatened strikers and their families.
“Stand shoulder to shoulder,” he thundered. “Stand shoulder to shoulder and remember the matchgirls, who won their fight and formed a union!”
On 18 July 1890, the new terms are settled and accepted by the newly born union and by Bryant and May, still in shock (but also pleased that they’d not had to cede more). That afternoon and evening, there is jubilation in the East End.
Streets and homes fill with happy, loud women in the bright, loud clothing the matchgirls are known to favor. Women talk, laugh, dance, and drink. There might even be a few fights, to tell the truth, but if so, they are all in good fun.
Even journalists are right, some of the time.
You switch out your regular scarf for one in bright blue and your everyday hat for your best one, all over red roses and feathers. You wear your best clothing and spend the evening with Annie at the Eagle in the City Road, even dancing on the crystal platform, just as you did before, when your heart beat and your jaw was whole.
When your Nan was alive.
Your Nan, your poor Nan, not laid in the rich soil of county Cork, not now in a better place clutching once more her babbies to her breast, but lost to heaven completely, for had she not been a witch, and a suicide to boot? Sure, she was laid to rest in the consecrated ground of the Catholic churchyard, but only because when Father Keene had interviewed your sisters and brothers, they had all sworn that she had been out of her head with grief for some time, ever since her favorite granddaughter had started showing the signs of phossy jaw. Sure to God, she’d never have done a thing like this while in her right mind, never.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2014 Edition Page 21
