Fourpenny Flyer (40 page)

It brought a lovely summer day and a late start and John quieter than ever. He said good morning to her when she woke, but then lapsed into complete silence, watching as she fed little Will, shaving himself ruminatively, and dressing without a word. It worried her that he was so withdrawn, for he could hardly be fatigued first thing in the morning, but she busied herself with the baby and tried to persuade herself that he had a great deal to think about with all the business he had to do, and that his silence was to be expected.

But the brooding expression on his face was the sign of a conflict which he hadn't expected and which was making him feel so ashamed that he couldn't talk to her about it. To be at home with her and Will in their beautiful house was unalloyed pleasure. But now, after one day travelling
en famille,
he had to admit that he did not welcome her presence on this journey.

She was too eager to talk, that was the trouble, and too busy with Will, and there were altogether too many people fussing around them. In the three years since their wedding, he had grown used to travelling quietly and alone, busy with his thoughts and his plans for business. So he had been short with her during the previous day, and too tired to make much conversation at dinner, and now he was irritable with himself, and sorry for her.

Fortunately, the Swan with Two Necks was already crowded when they came downstairs, for the Saturday
market was under way, and the coffee room was full of farmers drinking ale and enjoying one another's raucous company, and farmers' dogs gnawing chopbones and enjoying a little idleness. The coachyard was crowded, too, with two coaches ready to leave and their own awaiting a new team, which had still to be led out.

‘What's amiss, Horace?' John asked the coachman, glad to be back in the easily familiar world of men and horses.

‘Two gone lame, so they say, Mr Easter sir,' Horace said, spitting a long stream of chewed tobacco onto the cobbles. ‘Deuce tek it. We're five minutes late all-a-ready.'

He knows every coachman on the road, Harriet thought admiringly, as the two men continued their complaint, and she was glad that her dear John seemed more himself again. It did not concern her at all that they were five minutes late. Will had made a good breakfast and was chirruping with contentment on Rosie's broad shoulder, and it was pleasant out in the courtyard, with the morning sun warm on her shoulders and the place full of unusual people. There were several local women wrapped in shawls and wearing black bonnets over their caps selling stockings from huge wicker baskets carried on their hips. Perhaps there would be time for her to go and look at them. They seemed uncommon pretty.

‘Should we settle Will inside do 'ee think, John dear?' she asked, when he finally came back to stand beside her. ‘Or do I have time to go and look at the stockings?'

‘Look by all means, my dear,' he said. ‘We shall be a good many minutes yet. You might find a pair or two you would care to purchase.' A present would make amends for his neglect. ‘Choose two pairs.'

So while the new team was backed into position, and the travellers gathered about the coach ready to board, she picked two pairs of fine white hose, and an excellent bargain they were, being embroidered from mid-calf to ankle and only sixpence a pair. For a moment, as John handed over the shilling, she even wondered whether it might not be an economy to buy another pair, but then the ostler sang out ‘All set!' and the passengers surged forward and the stocking seller was pushed aside.

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 though 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.'