A Flight of Fancy (12 page)

With Whittaker gone, the pitch burned her nose. The night wind roared in her ears like that angry crowd pushing at the carriage, brandishing their torches, demanding more light from the nobleman inside. They were mad. She had been mad, shamed at her behavior. The torches brought memory of pain rushing back so she couldn’t move. In seconds, her friends could die. The field would be dark. The men might not know where to land or even if they landed in the right place.

Shaking, she lifted one of the sticks with its end dipped in pitch. Holding it at arm’s length and bending from the waist to keep herself as far from the flame as possible, she touched the new brand to the old. It flared at once, a white-hot light shooting into the night. Now she either needed to hold onto it or plant it in the ground like the others. She could not hold it.
Her arm ached from the effort of holding it straight out from her body. She could not kneel to set it into the ground. If she did, she might not get up again. She must hold it until she needed to light a new one—another difficulty. She could never hold two.

Her hand trembled and sparks flew. One dropped onto her sleeve. She screamed, slapped it out with her other hand. The torch dropped from her fingers. It lay on the fortunately damp grass and smoldered, more smoke now than flame, invisible in the dark.

“This will never work,” she cried aloud.

She. Must. Get. Ahold. Of herself. Must. Must. Must.

Teeth clenched, she picked up another torch. Just enough fire burned on the one Whittaker had lit for her to ignite the pitch of the new brand. Before the flame flared high, she shoved the end into the soft ground as she had seen Whittaker do. There, she had accomplished something on her own, overcome one fear. But the wind had changed, stiffened. First the torch flared higher from a gust in one direction, then another. She glanced up, sniffing for rain, straining her eyes for signs of clouds on the horizon or, more importantly, a sight of the balloon with its tongue of fire licking against the night.

The rain, the tang of salt from the sea, drifted on the wind. Dampness moistened her face, but no clouds showed. The torchlight blinded her from what sailed across the heavens, whether God- or man-created. Rain could prove disastrous. Besides getting poor Mr. Sorrells and Mr. Kent soaked, it could put out the brazier that produced the hot air and make them crash.

She laughed aloud, more a snort than a true expression of mirth. Of course it would rain. This was England. Yet men ballooned in the Lake District, the lands with the most rain she had ever heard of in England or the continent. They would
have to learn to manage if they wanted to make ballooning a practical form of travel.

Out of breath, her legs burning, she paused to light another torch and felt a drop of rain on her cheek. She couldn’t stay. She couldn’t wait for them. The physicians told her to have a care for her health until she had fully regained her strength. She had a mile to walk back to the house. If she didn’t start back now, she would be drenched. The torches wouldn’t stay lit in the rain anyway.

Muscles so tense she could barely place one foot in front of the other, Cassandra retraced her steps across the field to the parkland gate.

“Don’t do it!” Despite being breathless from running across his fields to a horse, followed by a mad gallop to town and then a race through the streets on foot, Whittaker tried to make his voice heard. Above the roar of twenty men bellowing destruction of the greedy mill owners, he doubted anyone heard him. “Destruction isn’t the answer.”

If they heard him, they ignored him. Hugh had worked the followers of so-called Captain Lud into a frenzy of anger and hatred for anyone who owned, rented, or even worked one of the looms before Whittaker managed to reach the outskirts of the Dale, where his uncle had predicted the future of the weaving industry would lie and thus had built his mills.

“The days of the small one or two looms in a man’s cottage are done, lad,” Uncle Hern had said before he died.

And therein lay the trouble. Men working the stocking and cloth looms at home couldn’t make enough money now with the competition of the larger mills that could keep men hired for
production all day and all night, where the looms were owned instead of rented. Mills that could afford the latest designs in machinery. Progress was not fair to the men who had done the same work as their fathers and their fathers before them. Whittaker had not created the change, though, and he needed the money too badly to let his uncle’s hard work and sacrifices go up in flames or fall to the axes many of the men carried.

“If you destroy the mills,” he tried again, “you’ll have no place to work. At the least—”

“Stubble it, Geoff.” Hugh grabbed his shoulder with a hand like an iron shackle.

Whittaker stubbled it—for the moment.

“We gotta teach these mill owners a lesson so’s they pay us a fair wage.” Hugh dropped his hand. “Ain’t nothin’ gonna stop these men outside an army.”

Which they just might get, and Whittaker was on the wrong side. If only he could tell them he paid a fair wage, took less in profits so the men could support their families. He was not responsible for the numbers of them who drank half their week’s wages before they got home.

Except that had not been so much of a problem when the men worked at home with their wives and children around them, helping, collecting the fees.

Whittaker tried another tack. “But surely the Hern mills have guards. These men aren’t armed.”

“The Hern mills don’t got enough guards.” Rob had come up on Whittaker’s other side.

Probably not, but Major Crawford knew about the imminent attack. He might send soldiers. Guards with muskets could do more damage than men with axes and cudgels. Unfortunately, they flourished firebrands too. A touch of flame to a bale of
cotton fresh off the ship from America, a bundle of flax recently harvested in Ireland, or, worst of all, oily wool from his very own sheep, and the conflagration would destroy his livelihood.

As fire had destroyed his marriage plans.

“They’ll hang you if you’re caught,” was all Whittaker could think to say.

But surprisingly few men had been caught, fewer hanged for their destruction of looms and workshops in Nottingham and Yorkshire. The men around him knew it. They remained too anonymous or too dedicated to the same cause as everyone else to betray one another. The three he could identify for the authorities were not enough, were too unimportant. The authorities wanted leaders, men whose capture, trial, and execution would matter enough to the others to stop future revolts. No revolutions by the mobs would happen in England.

He charged forward with the others, seeking faces, listening for names. The men wore caps pulled low to shield their eyes, beards to conceal their facial features, even scarves as makeshift masks on this cold and increasingly damp night.

Whittaker prayed for rain. A deluge might dampen their enthusiasm for destruction. But the clouds only loosed their water in an occasional shower, leaving enough dry spells for the torches to be relighted and burn brightly, and leaving his prayer as unanswered as had been every one since Cassandra’s accident. Like his father, God punished him by ignoring him or taking away something he dearly wanted.

“Oh, Cassandra.” He murmured her name like a groan of pain, then skidded to a halt.

What was he thinking to pray for rain? It might save his mill, but Cassandra’s health was not good enough for her to be out in the rain, soaked to the skin. If she caught a chill after
fighting the fever brought on by her burns, she might succumb to a lung fever.

No, no, God would not hurt Cassandra to punish him. He knew that in his head. His heart ached so badly he could not breathe.

“Going pudding-hearted?” Hugh called back. He and Rob spun away from the mob and flanked Whittaker again.

Whittaker pressed a hand to his side. “Stitch in my side is all.”

“Uh-huh.” Hugh prodded Whittaker forward with something harder than a fist to the spine.

Rob grabbed his upper arm in sausage-like fingers. “You wouldn’t be wanting to slip off and rouse the authorities, would you?”

“Not at all.” The absolute truth. He had already warned the authorities. The stitch was real too. He should not have gone to see Cassandra. Yet he could not have risked her going up in a balloon. Recently two men had died when their balloon caught fire and crashed. Cassandra must have nothing more happen to her. He did not know if her friends would protect her. But even if they did, those friends should not be alone with her, two men and one female in the middle of the night. She was not thinking clearly. Or at all.

And neither was he. He had to keep going, yield to these men’s shoves forward into the middle of the crowd. Shouting, cursing, threatening men roared their way toward one of the Hern mills with the owner in their midst, at the front of the pack. He was with them now, a part of the rebellion. Who cared that he had been blackmailed into it? If Bainbridge, Crawford, and his companion denied the blackmail, Whittaker was a dead man. Worse than a dead man—part of the nobility turned against his country.

A traitor.

The crowd trapped him at the front of the throng, a good place to be to win men’s trust. A bad place to be to stay alive if the guards were prepared.

They were prepared. The first volley of gunfire boomed over the heads of the charging men, a warning shot over the bows. No one heeded it. No one stopped. Enough of them knew the time needed for men to reload or exchange one musket for another. And the missiles began to fly—cudgels, stones from the street, and flaming torches from one end.

“Take ’em down, lads,” someone shouted. Whittaker could not tell from which side.

Guns fired, fists and harder implements struck flesh. Men groaned or screamed in pain, bellowed outrage, fought in silence. All became a melee of surging, struggling bodies—arms and legs, flying fists, and tumbling forms lit by a fire at one end of the mill.

Flames danced off the silver gorget of a military man. Crawford had sent reinforcements, bless him. Whittaker ducked away from the man, remaining behind others, avoiding blows and shots on his way to the fire. He had to put out the fire, stop the devastation—

Another scarlet-coated man materialized in front of him. He held a horse pistol in both hands and took aim from less than a yard away.

“No,” Whittaker called out. “I’m not—”

A flash flared brighter than the distant fire. Whittaker lunged aside—too late. Other blasts and a strange roaring blotted out the boom of exploding gunpowder, and the hit slammed into him like a blacksmith’s hammer. He staggered back, caught his foot on rough cobbles, and fell, his head striking the iron gatepost to his own mill and knocking him unconscious.

10

Swallowing to keep herself from sobbing, Cassandra flung open the door to her bedchamber so hard it banged against the wall. A shriek pierced the door to the adjacent room and Honore flew from her bedchamber to grab Cassandra and drag her into a chair. “Where have you been? Oh, never you mind. I know. You are soaked quite through and you must get into your bed at once. Here.” She thrust a nightcap at Cassandra. “Put this over your wet hair. Did you not think to put up your hood?”

“I do not like hoods. They keep me from—”

“Never you mind that either. Hurry. One of the maids just warned me. Lady Whittaker is coming down here any moment now. Something about how she wants to deliver the bad news herself.”

At that moment, footfalls clattered down the hall and someone pounded on the sitting room door. “Cassandra? Honore?” Lady Whittaker called.

Cassandra and Honore exchanged a glance, mouths open, eyes wide.

“I’ll delay her.” Honore dashed for the sitting room.

Cassandra dragged herself to her feet with the aid of the chair’s sturdy arm and kicked her muddy boots under the bed as she yanked her dressing gown on over her soaked dress.

“Is Cassandra awake?” Lady Whittaker was saying in the next room. “I must speak to her.”

Cassandra’s gaze flew to the clock. Half past one of the clock. Her stomach turned somersaults, twisting itself into knots. Her heart had surely ceased beating. She couldn’t feel it beating over the nausea from knowing something was wrong.

“Would you like me to go awaken her?” Honore asked. “I am awake because I’m writing a book, you know, and that keeps me up until all hours, but Cassandra is still—”

“I am sorry, child. I will wake her myself if necessary.”

It was not necessary. Things just must appear so.

With shaking hands, Cassandra shoved the nightcap over her wet hair and stumbled to the door. She tugged it open as Lady Whittaker was reaching for the latch. “What’s amiss?”

“Oh, my dear.” Her ladyship clasped Cassandra’s hands. Hers felt as cold as Cassandra’s. Tears brightened her deep brown eyes. “It is Geoffrey. He—I do not know how to say this except for straight-out. He has been shot.”

Honore gasped. Her face paled.

Cassandra’s head spun. Images of Whittaker in his laborer’s garb flashed through her mind. “He cannot have been shot. I just saw—” She pressed the back of her hand to her lips. “I mean, who would shoot him? Where? When? All seemed well enough—” She stopped her babbling a second time—too late.