Authors: Nicky Penttila
Fear punched Maddie in the chest. She stepped back, against the drum, and almost fell off the platform. A man in the platform’s center was waving, standing halfway up the stairs. “Women this way!”
Maddie reached for Kitty, and they locked hands. Her sister’s face was wild with anger, but the noise was such Maddy couldn’t hear what she was shouting. As they were pushed down the stairs, Kitty’s hand let go.
Maddie turned back, pulling herself out of the stream of ladies running for the carriage to go back for Kitty. The wagons were rocking, the ties binding them together pulling apart. The yeoman must be boarding from the front.
The short stair collapsed.
“Good god, sir, don’t you see they are attacking the yeomanry? Disperse the meeting!”
Heywood’s voice was ragged as he stood at the top of the steps to Buxton’s house, but his eyes were clear with rage. From the base of the steps, Nash watched him order Lt. Col. L’Estrange to send his trained cavalry troops into battle as if he were watching a play upon the stage. This couldn’t be real.
Ethelston leaned out the balcony’s window, speaking the words to the Riot Act in a voice that only the soldiers and committee men could hear. At least the Act allowed the crowd an hour to disperse. Nothing serious could happen till then.
They intended to arrest Hunt. To arrest Maddie. He played through his mind the steps he’d need to take to get her released from jail. He wasn’t sure who the magistrate on duty was this week, but surely no one would want women held in that cesspit overnight. He’d pledge the warehouse as surety; they couldn’t want more. But what if they charged her with gross sedition? There might be no bail at all.
The thought of her locked away from him tore at his chest. He pushed it out of mind, concentrating on the military arrayed against her. L’Estrange had mounted and was shouting orders. Nash grabbed the man’s ankle, careful to avoid spooking his charger. The lieutenant was young but cool under fire, and he’d put up with the committee with no more than the occasional locked jaw and reminder that they were no longer at war.
“You’ll not wait the hour?”
“I have my orders.” He’d just ordered them to present. They were going in now.
Nash didn’t let go. “But there are women and children here.”
“I have my orders, sir.” But he put a hand on Nash’s shoulder. “I’m not a monster, man. We won’t wage war on the people.” But that was exactly what the yeomanry were doing, Nash saw as he trailed the horses to the edge of the street. Those part-time soldiers had not been in danger, yet had lashed out. He knew reinforcements, infantry and artillery, stood in the streets to his left and right. If this caught fire, no one would escape it.
Maddie, his Maddie, was in the thick of it.
Malbanks stood beside him and grimaced. “A right scheme, this was. Every district in Britain is in revolt. At least Manchester will be preserved. We will not be taken.”
Nash couldn’t help responding, though he knew nothing could reverse the man’s mind. “You’ve made it so they cannot escape, even the innocent. The exits are blocked.”
“Just as well. Quicker this way.”
“May all the souls who die today wait for you at the pearly gates.” St. Peter himself must surely be watching.
“They are traitors, Quinn. They will rest in hell.”
Nash mounted his horse, trying to steady his mind so he wouldn’t spook her. As he turned the mare’s head toward lower Mosley Street, away from the field, he watched L’Estrange’s Fifteenth Hussars lining themselves along the eastern end of the field. They would be the bottom pincer, with the yeomanry at the north the top, pressing the people into the fixed bayonets of the Eighty-eighth Infantry. A slaughter waiting to happen. Nash knew he couldn’t stop it. He knew he should run. In battle, weapons don’t discriminate.
He turned his horse back toward the crowd. Toward Maddie.
He followed the wake of the first line of cavalry. As they met the crowd, they slowed, and he shot through them toward the hustings, barely registering the bloody gashes and moans of constables and crowd alike. The field was screaming. He opened his mouth to match it, to keep the scream from lodging inside him.
Fewer than a dozen people still stood on the hustings, constables in blue pushing men in brown down. A flash of white at the front, skirts swinging. Her bonnet pushed back, her arms wielding the pole like a scythe, Maddie seemed to be floating in midair.
She must have tried to jump and caught herself on a piece of the wagon. She couldn’t reach the ground. She couldn’t get away.
A yeoman galloped past, slashing the pole apart damned close to her hands. She wriggled and reached back, trying to free herself, as the man turned his horse to charge her again.
Nash gouged his horse’s belly, pushing her to run. He had to get there first.
Her arms crossed in front of her, the short pole facing away, as she swung to nearly facing him. The front of her dress was dark red with blood. Someone had already gotten to her.
Bile rose to his throat, his nose. His horse snorted at the pain of his kicks. He would kill that yeoman.
As he rode past Trefford, arm raised for another blow, Nash stripped the sword from his hand. Not slowing down as he reached the platform, he swung the blade to just behind Maddie. His arm rang at the impact of the weapon on the nail, but the blade won out. She was free. He leaned to wrap his left arm around her shoulders, but she’d slid water-fast to the ground.
With a powerful underswing, he knocked the charging yeoman’s sword away. As the man passed, the surprise on his face turned to pain as Nash punched him in the side hard enough to knock him off his beast.
Nash dropped down beside her. The screams, the shouts, the sickening crunch of bone and suck of wounded flesh that had assaulted him while astride fell to nothing. All he heard was her too-loud gasps, the gurgle of blood punctuating the end of each breath.
She lay in a ball, trying to protect her insides. From the front, he could see her shoulder blades between the pulses of her heart.
“Cross your arms tight, sweetheart. Hold yourself in.”
He scooped her up, and pushed himself to stand. Her head lolled back, eyes closed, pain altering her features beyond recognition. He had to get her help. The hospital, or Lady Egerton’s house. Heywood’s, if he had to. Her hand scrabbled at his shirt, but had no strength to grasp it.
“That’s him!”
He looked up at L’Estrange riding toward him. Then eye level, at the angry young yeoman he’d felled. The first punch, to his jaw, only made him stagger. The second, at his temple, stunned him enough that he let go of Maddie. She hit the ground without a whimper.
“Enough! He’s under arrest. I’ll take him myself. Yeoman, move on.”
Nash dropped to his knees, trying to scoop her up again. As he touched her shoulder, her body gave way.
Her dress gaped open, exposing all she had lost. He slipped off his coat and draped it over her, shielding her innards from the sun.
He wiped the gore from her beautiful face. Her head fell back, lids opening, her unseeing eyes a pure reflection of the sky’s perfect blue.
Kitty.
* * * *
Faster than the day’s faint breeze, panic swept across the field. The crowd that had been pressing so persistently toward the hustings now was fleeing it. Maddie quickly made her way to the front of the platform.
On the boards, the dark-clad special constables had their truncheons out, clubbing whomever stood in their path, their weapons rising and falling. One constable tugged Hunt by the coattails as if to throw him off the stand and onto the ground. Others were ripping the flags and breaking their poles, some by swinging them at the people on the stands. She saw the older lady fall. Chivalry be damned; they were not going to spare the women today.
A man jumped from the wagon, falling into the path of one of the part-time cavalry. Maddie quickly looked away, but she couldn’t block out the sound of crunching bone and howling voice. It took her eyes panicked seconds to find Kitty in the melee. Her sister had backed up, pushing the giant drum between her and the club-wielding men. But two of them had longer reach, landing blows on her shoulders. One knocked her hand back into her face, blacking her eye.
The pain of each blow seemed to echo in Maddie’s body. Her vision blurred.
“Jump, Kit! I’ll catch ye.” Her father’s voice cut through the din. He was as far away as Maddie, but back and to the side, pushing against a tide of fleeing women. The truncheons would lay Kitty low before he got to her.
Maddie got to the front edge of the hustings first. “No! Jump here. Here!” She pounded on the bed of the wagon, as if her puny force could distract anyone from the grisly dance on stage.
Kitty must have heard her; they locked gazes. Another blow knocked Kitty’s shoulder crooked, but she kicked the drum at him, pushing him back and giving her room to run straight off the front of the stage. Maddie stepped back to give her space to fall. She held out her arms and held in her breath, bracing for her sister’s dead weight.
She didn’t hear the horseman until the force of another flailing body hit her from behind. She was thrust forward, past the corner of the stage, landing on her hands and hips a good yard from where Kitty should have landed. Maddie’s face and hair were wet with blood. A young man, his shoulder cleaved from his body, lay across her.
She had to get back to Kitty. She rolled out from under him, not listening, not hearing his screams, and scrambled to her knees. Spitting dust and blood, she blinked hard to clear her vision, and then wished she hadn’t.
In front of her were the deadly prancing steps of giant horseshoes. Which meant above her was one of those killing swords. She froze, her fear so great it sharpened every sense while dulling her power of volition. “This is Waterloo for you!” His sword hand wobbled, a sign of poor practice, but it did not stop its arc directly at her.
It was only inches away when she regained control of her limbs. She pushed herself backwards, trying to get away, but the movement first raised her chest, pushing it toward the blade.
The force of the blow severed the plackets of her dress and pounded her heart into a solid bruise. But it also pushed her farther back and down, where he couldn’t reach her to deal a second blow from way up on that high horse. She told her limbs to move, scramble away from those sharpened hooves, but they did not respond. She wasn’t going to be able to help Kitty. She couldn’t even help herself.
She closed her eyes, shutting the blood and din and smell and chaos out. In the safety of her mind, she said farewell to Kitty, to her friends from school, to her parents, one by one.
Then Nash’s face flashed behind her eyelids. She couldn’t say goodbye to him. He refused to listen, even in her own imagination. He would not let go, would not believe she was through. Get up, he said, and fight for your family. That’s how you prove you deserve one.
She opened her eyes. She lay on her side beside the bloodied man, now merely groaning. The cavalryman had turned away from her, looking for more live meat. She moved her arm and pressed her palm against her chest. Dry. No blood.
Shocked into sense, she ran her fingers up and down. The blade had split one of the stays in her corset. The stays were bone, two inches wide and a quarter-inch thick, she knew from the corset maker’s advert. Her skin might be scratched enough to scar, but nothing more.
If she could just catch her breath, she could get away from here. Windmill Street wasn’t but twenty yards behind her. She struggled to sit up, and wiped at the blood on the side of her neck and face.
A thought floated by. She wasn’t modestly attired at the moment, her dress gapping like that and blood all in her hair. She shouldn’t really be seen in public. The idea somehow calmed her, and she took a sip of air.
“There ye be.” Strong hands under her arms jerked her to her feet. Her father, a gash on his temple but still seeming to have all his senses. He must have helped Kitty, and then come back for her. “Can ye run or must I carry ye?”
She took a step and did not fall. He clasped her hand in his, both slippery, hers from blood, his simple sweat. They slipped under the wagons and then dashed onto the street. The yeomanry must have massed here, she could see their trampling, but all were on the field now.
Step by labored step, they slid past the carnage. Screams and a crunch of metal behind them turned her head. Between the horses, she saw a pile of arms and legs and torsos tumbling down one of the cellars of a rowhouse.
With each step, Maddie’s dim hopes rose. She might live through this.
“Keep moving, lass. We’re not safe yet.”
But safety felt just a step ahead. Beside them stumbled women and men with cuts across their faces and hands and children whose faces were streaked only with terror.
“Just around the bend.”
With a sigh of relief, they passed the crowd at Mount Street and could see the sign for lower Moseley and escape. But as they passed the final knot of men and horses, the flow of frightened people around them stopped.
Turning the corner, blocking their escape, came an army, bayonets fixed and aimed straight at them.
Maddie and the others froze in terror. Then they realized the soldiers were only creeping at them. They weren’t going to mow them down, merely slowly crush them underfoot. They did not leave room enough for a body to pass. Regular troops, trained and cool under the heat of the sun, they would not stop.
Maddie recovered her wits before her father did. She tugged him to the side of the street. His feet trod slowly, as if his clogs were sticking to the cobblestones.
There—an eighteen inch alley between houses, not meant for any but the night-soil man. She dragged him to the entry and pushed him in ahead of her. He was a tight squeeze, and unwilling. The stench stalled her too, but holding her breath she pressed them on. They had no other option.