Fourpenny Flyer

by Beryl Kingston

  And then the whole place was caught up in the noise and excitement of departure, with dogs barking and leaping, and hooves clopping against the cobbles and pole chains clinking, and voices calling goodbye.

  ‘Yook! Yook!’ Will said to her happily as Peg passed him to Rosie, who was already in the coach, and John offered his arm to his wife to help her climb aloft to her outside seat, and she was so happy to be on the road again that her spirits lifted like a bird taking flight. And then, just as the coachman was gathering the reins, there was a further excitement as a gentleman came running out of the coffee room into the yard, yelling ‘hold hard!’ and scrambled aloft to sit beside her.

  ‘Just in time!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Lord, what a rush!’

  He was a most affable gentleman, and a very good looking one, being at least six foot tall and with a most open and honest expression on his face. A man you could hardly help noticing, she thought, noticing him, for he had thick fair hair beneath his blue top hat and yet his moustache was almost ginger. How curious. He wore a blue cloth coat to match his hat and his gloves were made of cheveril leather and even his boots and breeches were quite spotless. A very noticeable gentleman.

  Then she realized that he was looking at her and she dropped her eyes in confusion, embarrassed to have been caught staring.

  ‘It is a fine morning, sir,’ the gentleman said, addressing his remarks to John in the correct manner. ‘Do you travel far?’

  ‘To Manchester, sir,’ John said, speaking shortly and without expression as he always did when addressed by a stranger. He had no intention of making unnecessary conversation, not if he could help it.

  But this stranger wasn’t at all put down by coldness. ‘Why so do I, sir,’ he said cheerfully. ‘So do I. What a fine thing to have company. Travel can be wearisome, can it not, when one is alone?’

  ‘That depends entirely upon one’s cast of mind.’

  ‘Oh indeed,’ the stranger said. ‘My opinion entirely. Entirely my opinion.’ And he smiled at them both.

  Harriet smiled back because he really was such a nice friendly man and it would have been discourteous to have ignored him even though John was cool.

  ‘You travel with your family, I believe, ma’am,’ the stranger said. ‘’Twas your baby I saw you kiss, was it not? A pretty baby, ma’am, if you will permit me to say so. Uncommon like her mother.’

  ‘He is a boy, sir,’ Harriet said. ‘William.’

  ‘A find child, ma’am. You must be very proud of him.’

  ‘Oh I am,’ Harriet said and she proceeded to explain how much. And so their new companion complimented his way into conversation. By the time they reached Loughborough, where the church bells were ringing with uncommon sweetness, John had unbent sufficiently to exchange names, and the stranger, who said he was called Mr Richards, pronounced himself honoured to have met one of the sons of the great firm of A. Easter and Sons, ‘it being quite the most dependable of any I have ever encountered, sir, if I may make so bold as to say so’.

  So Harriet told him about the shop in the Strand, ‘where all the work is done’, since John still seemed disinclined to talk and she didn’t like to appear rude to such a friendly man. And he seemed very interested.

  At Derby, at an old black and white inn called the Dolphin, they changed teams in less than three minutes, which, so Mr Richards said, was ‘an uncommon impressive feat’. Consequently they arrived at the Green Man and Black’s Head in Ashbourne just as the parish church was striking midday.

  ‘Best church in the whole of the Peak District, ma’am,’ Mr Richards said, admiring the great spire that dominated the little town. ‘They call it the Cathedral of the Peaks, did ’ee know that? Now you will see some scenery, I’ll warrant, for we’re to take the high road to Buxton so I’m told. But you must sample a piece of the famous Ashbourne gingerbread before we leave this place, must she not Mr Easter? Made from a secret recipe passed on to the local people here by French prisoners during the war against Napoleon. Did ’ee know that?’ He was a veritable encyclopaedia of information, a fact that made John dislike him even more heartily, particularly as Harriet found him entertaining.

  And of course he was right about the gingerbread, which was hot and spicy and very filling, and the scenery, which was breathtaking.

  Harriet was deeply impressed by it, for she had never seen mountains before and the sight of these high peaks ranged one upon the other was wonderfully romantic, all those wild slopes covered in green scrub and patched with dark pine forests, and the distant heights so far away that they were little more than mauve and ochre mist, and all those higgledy-piggledy dry-stone walls dividing the rocky fields, and the low clouds fairly scudding overhead and casting long swathes of moving shadow over everything beneath them.

  ‘How beautiful it is!’ she said to John as the coach rocked them along. ‘What a joy to be travelling here.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and he bent his head so that his mouth touched her ear. ‘I would enjoy it a deal more,’ he whispered, ‘if we could have the place to ourselves:’

  ‘I too,’ she said, smiling at him. And she was glad that he seemed more himself.

  It was past three o’clock when they reached Whaley Bridge, and by then the sky was beginning to cloud over.

  ‘It will rain now, you may depend upon it,’ Mr Richards said. ‘It always rains in Manchester. In fact, the poets would say that Nature herself is weeping against the iniquity of the place.’

  ‘I do not doubt they would,’ John said to him coldly. ‘Poets being free with such foolish sayings.’

  ‘Oh, my own view entirely,’ Mr Richards hastened to agree. ‘Entirely my own view.’

  ‘Is it a bad place, John?’ Harriet asked, quite anxiously. But even as she spoke, they reached the top of the incline and she saw the city for herself. Or to be more accurate, she saw the smoke cloud under which the city lay, a huge, grey-brown, amorphous mass of shifting vapour, several miles across in every direction, heaving and swelling like some vast stranded sea monster.

  For a few startled seconds she thought the countryside was on fire, for she could see the occasional glimpse of red flame glimmering under the murk, or a streak of yellow light, lurid and unearthly, but then she realized that the fires were merely lighted windows and that the oily black smoke that was coiling upwards out of the mass was rising from the tops of equally oily black chimneys.

  ‘’Tis a city of seventy thousand souls,’ Mr Richards said, ‘if souls they can be called, not one of whom has the right to cast a vote, and not one of whom has elected any member to the present Parliament to represent his views, since Manchester does not have the right to return a member to Parliament, which many would consider a scandal when Old Sarum returns two with an electorate that number merely eleven.’

  ‘John,’ Harriet said, ‘why is it so smoky?’

  ‘It is a manufacturing town,’ he told her. ‘And you cannot have manufacture without smoke, or soot or machinery. That is the way things are, I fear.’

  ‘My opinion entirely,’ Mr Richards said. ‘Entirely my opinion.’

  And so they rocked downhill into the city and no more was said. After a mile they could smell the soot and taste the oil in the air. After two they could hear the noise of the mills, a steady unremitting reverberation like distant thunder. It made Harriet feel uneasy, despite her attempts to be reasonable.

  And seven miles later they were trundling along an unkempt road between the mills, tall, square-set, uncompromising buildings, bearing their owners’ tall, square-set, uncompromising names. Here machines crunched and clashed with such power that the whole place juddered under their impact and the windows rattled in their frames. Here huge black pistons punched and pounded with monotonous and terrible regularity, like chastening rods in huge iron fists. And everything was grimed. The red brick of the factory buildings was smeared with soot and encrusted with oily black grease; a warehouse with small barred windows had green lichen stains all down its walls as t
hough someone had thrown green slime over it. And above all these damp, dour, formidable buildings the sky was totally empty; there was no colour, no cloud, no movement, no summer, just a vast dirty grey blankness.

  ‘Oh John,’ Harriet whispered, ‘’tis an ugly place.’

  ‘We shall only stay for as long as is necessary,’ he promised, warmed to be able to comfort her.

  The coach toiled up the steep winding alley that was Market Street and stopped outside a black and white inn so ancient and ramshackle it looked as though it had been cobbled together from the remnants of six or seven other buildings. They had arrived.

  ‘I trust I shall meet with you again,’ Mr Richards said, bounding down into the coach yard. And was gone before he could hear John’s reply. Which was just as well, since the disgruntled Mr Easter’s answer was, ‘I very much hope not.’

  They settled into their rooms at the Royal Hotel. The next day was Sunday, so they went to church in a fine new church dedicated to St Ann which formed one side of a new tree-lined square, to which they returned later that afternoon to dine with Mr Clarke, who kept a bookshop in the market place and said he was ‘proud to be a friend to Mr Easter, yes indeed, and delighted to have the opportunity to meet his charming wife’.

  The guests about the table that evening were all concerned with books and newspapers in one way or another, being booksellers, and newspaper sellers and the editors of two local papers, so the conversation was easy and relaxed and familiar. But presently they began to tell their two visitors from London all about a great radical meeting that had been called for the following morning. Mr Taylor, who wrote articles for the local papers and was short and dark-haired and full of energy, had a poster advertising the meeting, which he passed about the table to Harriet’s considerable interest.

  It was signed by Mr Henry Hunt, the orator, and was addressed to the ‘Inhabitants of Manchester and Neighbourhood’.

  ‘Fellow Countrymen,’ it said: ‘You will meet on Monday next, my friends, and by your steady, firm and temperate deportment you will convince all your enemies that you have an important and imperious public duty to perform.

  ‘The eyes of all England, nay, of all Europe, are fixed upon you: and every friend of real Reform and of rational Liberty, is tremblingly alive to the result of your Meeting on Monday next.’

  It sounded very important. ‘’Twill be a big meeting, I don’t doubt,’ John said.

  ‘Very big,’ Mr Taylor agreed. ‘They do say there will be sixty thousand people there. ’Twill be a magnificent sight to see. There are to be bands and banners, and reporters from all the London papers.’

  ‘Are you to be there, Mr Taylor?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Indeed I am,’ Mr Taylor said. ‘I would not miss it for the world.’

  ‘Ain’t there like to be a riot with such a large gathering?’ John asked, mindful of the safety of his wife and child.

  ‘No indeed, Mr Easter,’ Mr Taylor reassured at once. ‘That is the entire point of issuing this notification. The marchers are all pledged to keep themselves in perfect control. Each and every one of them. They are all quite splendidly prepared and totally calm, despite the presence of government spies and suchlike who would like to provoke them. Indeed, that is one purpose of the meeting: to demonstrate their calm in the face of provocation.’

  That sounded reasonable, Harriet thought, despite the excitable tone of the notice. Sometimes, as she knew from the preachers of her childhood, it was necessary to show your enemies how resolute and calm you could be. In fact, calm was one acknowledged way of defeating the devil. ‘An admirable purpose,’ she said.

  ‘The other and more important purpose, however,’ another guest pointed out, ‘is to ask for reform of our present parliamentary system, which is manifestly rotten and agreed to be so by all reasonable men.’

  ‘Sixty thousand people,’ Mr Taylor said, ‘gathered together peaceably to ask for their rights as citizens. What could be more proper or well-controlled than that?’

  ‘Nothing will come of it,’ Mr Clarke said, ‘for ’tis all folly. Howsomever ’tis like to be a moment of history and my wife and I will be there to see it. I have a friend with lodgings in Windmill Street, d’ye see. His rooms overlook the very field itself, so we shall have the best of possible views. How if you were to accompany me there, Mr Easter? You and your charming wife, of course. I’m sure he would be agreeable to it.’

  ‘I have work to do tomorrow,’ John said, ‘thank ’ee all the same. But Mrs Easter might care to accept your offer.’ She was looking quite animated about this meeting, and if she were with Mr and Mrs Clarke and inside a house she would be quite safe, even if the crowds did get a little boisterous. It would keep her occupied and make up to her for his neglect.

  She considered the offer thoughtfully for a moment or two, her neat head bowed. ‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘thank ’ee, Mr Clarke, I do believe I should like to see this meeting, for it sounds as though ’twill be a great occasion. There is only one thing….’

  ‘What is that, my dear?’ Mr Clarke encouraged.

  ‘May I bring my baby and his nursemaid too, an’t please you? I should not care to be parted from him for too long in a strange city.’

  So it was agreed. And the next morning, when John set off for Salford and the office of the solicitors who were handling the rent of another Easter shop, Harriet put on her pretty new embroidered stockings, and promised John that she would stay inside the building until the meeting was over and disbanded, and then she and Rosie and baby Will took a threesome carriage to Windmill Street to see history being made.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Above the smoke haze it was a lovely summer’s day, and even below it the air was warm and the motes that swirled within it gilded like tiny fireflies. As the threesome carriage joggled Harriet and Rosie and baby Will out of the narrow crush of Market Street, sunshine was visibly filtering through the cloud.

  They were in a wide street lined on either side by fine town houses, which the coachman told Harriet was ‘Moseley Street, ma’am, where the nobs live hereabouts’. But it wasn’t the nobs who were promenading that morning. The street was completely filled with working people, all going in the same direction and all of them on the march, men in felt caps and leather breeches and rough brown fustian jackets, women in summer cottons and Sunday-go-to-meeting bonnets, children in brown holland pinafores, toddlers riding pig-a-back, babes in arms. There was a fife band playing ‘St Patrick’s Day in the Morning’ some distance ahead of them, and two of the marchers were carrying an enormous silk banner, bracing their backs against the weight of it because it was billowing in the breeze like a great sail. It was made of green silk and bore the painted legend, ‘Taxation without representation is unjust and tyrannical.’

  Harriet looked at the faces all around her and knew that there was no need for any anxiety about this meeting at all. These people were not rioters. They were decent, working people, quiet and orderly. They smiled up at her with cheerful friendliness, and one or two waved as the carriage trotted alongside them.

  ‘We’ll see thee at Peter’s Field,’ one young woman called. And Harriet called back. ‘Yes. Yes indeed.’ And was glad to be included in her company.

  It took a long time to negotiate the half-mile between Market Street and the chosen assembly place because all the approaches were full of marchers, but eventually the threesome inched past the classical portico of St Peter’s church and was able to trot along the relative emptiness of Lower Moseley Street. It came to a halt before a dense mass of people who were streaming into a narrow pathway immediately to their left.

  ‘That opening there is Windmill Street, missus,’ the coachman said, pointing at the pathway with his whip. ‘You’ll need to walk t’ last step I’m thinkin’, for there’ll be no teking this horse through such a scrimmage.’ Which was true enough. ‘’Tis nobbut a step.’

  And that was true, too, although their steps were very much jostled and they were both
quite glad to see Mr Clarke looking out for them on a doorstep a little further along the path, for Windmill Street turned out to be a single terrace of very plain houses facing an open field.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘We’ve been quite worried for you in this crush. Did you ever see such a turnout? Come upstairs, pray do. ‘Tis a fine room and a quite excellent view. Just wait until you see it. Mr Murgatroyd expects you.’

  Mr Murgatroyd was a gangly young man with very thin limbs and very sparse hair and moist protruding eyes like a rabbit. He greeted them at the top of the first flight of stairs, shaking Harriet’s hand most warmly and then ushering her into his ‘sitting room’, which was very sparsely furnished but had two windows overlooking the field. There he offered a stool to Rosie and the baby and a rather battered armchair to Harriet, arranging it next to ‘Mrs Clarke’s chair’, right beside one of the windows.

  ‘What a day this is!’ he said excitedly. ‘Do you not think so, Mrs Easter? What a day! We shall have tea and cakes presently. The landlady is to bring them up for us. I trust that will suit. What a day! Did you ever imagine we should see so many turn out, particularly when Mr Nadin and the magistrates expressly forbade it a week ago? Oh they must agree to reform now, surely, in the face of such numbers.’

  ‘You support the reformists, Mr Murgatroyd?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ her host said ardently. ‘’Tis a truth I hold to be self-evident.’

  ‘Self-evident nonsense,’ Mr Clarke said cheerfully, looking out of the window at the gathering crowd. ‘What would the likes of them know of voting and elections, eh? Tell me that.’

  ‘With education …’ Mr Murgatroyd offered.

  ‘Education, sir?’ Mr Clarke said. ‘Hotheads the lot of ‘em. And hotheads get their skulls cracked. That’s all there is to be said about hotheads. Our Deputy Constable, Mr Nadin, has called out the Manchester Yeomanry.’