Authors: Nicky Penttila
They popped out into a closed space less than the width of Nash’s bed and holding three privies, ancient but still in use. Maddie bent, hands on her thighs, to recover her breath. But her nose refused to take in the air her lungs were screaming for. She forced herself to inhale; the air scorched her nose and burned its way down to her already bruised lungs. Her body felt as if it were working at one-quarter capacity, her heart as leaden as that artillery’s cannon.
The courtyard’s filth hurt her eyes, but the picture of what had occurred on the field blotted it out. Impressions she had not had time to notice in their pell-mell escape now crowded her mind for attention. One woman screaming as another’s forehead split open. A man, clutching his hand, hanging from a fold of skin, his attacker riding away with the pole he had been holding. Mounds of clothing writhing in the dust and dirt. A boy, unhurt, not running away but crouching beside his fallen mother, crying for help. So much blood.
“Go ahead, cry, sweeting.” Her father laid his heavy hand on her shoulder. She felt him shudder. “Hunt and them had it wrong. City rules don’t hold for Manchester men.”
Maddie sobbed, as deep as her bruised chest could stand, her horror mixed with wonder. Her father had come to her. Her true father. She leaned into his embrace, the brightest of silver linings in this death-cloud of a day.
How could this have happened to her, to them? Her first meeting ever, and it ended in bloodshed. Nash would never forgive her now. Could she ever forgive him? A committee man, he must have agreed to call this attack. He, at least, knew better.
It was right for her to leave him. Her true supporter stood at her side now, or rather leaned against the brick wall. She’d waited all her life for someone to choose her, just her, and now someone had. She turned her tear-streaked face up to his.
He pulled the cap off his head and wiped at her teary face absently, looking down the alley. “Rum foul in here, but it’s still commotion without.”
“How long, do you think?”
“Gudgeons will make short work of us.” Then he froze, head tilted, as if listening to a silent bird in his head.
Or repeating her upper-crust accents.
He spun her to face him, pushing her shoulders into the brick. She winced as he shoved her bonnet back.
“Look on me!”
She looked full at him, watching the darks of his eyes grow round. He dropped her shoulders and brought his hands to his face as if he didn’t believe they were his own. A keening came from his throat, resolving into a hissing whisper.
“Where is my daughter?”
“What ha’ thee done with my Kitty?”
Her father slapped the sides of his head once, twice, three times before Maddie thought to take his hands in hers.
“I thought you knew.” Hadn’t he said she was nothing like Kitty? How could he pretend to be surprised? Yet in the cramped courtyard, fouled by generations of waste, here he stood, flabbergasted.
He wrenched his hands away, tipping her off balance across the opening to the alley. Before he could enter it, he had to stop and turn his hips sideways, which gave her time enough to take his hand again.
“Wait. You don’t know if they’re through.”
He didn’t even try to release her grip, just dragged her behind him as he side-stepped back to the street. Back into fresh air—and danger. They emerged onto the street, and saw a nearly deserted field. Her father stopped, gasping for breath, as if he could not understand what he was seeing. Where tens of thousands of people had stood and cheered, now stood only remnants of their presence, the wounded and the dead.
The sun shone blindly on an array of caps and bonnets, shawls and coats, misshapen, bloody. Shoes and clogs their owners’ feet had run directly out of in their flight. So many, as if a hurricane had whisked the people up, and everyone had dropped whatever they held in their hands. To their right, near the corner house, the cavalry had dismounted, seeing to their horses and cleaning their swords. Laughing and slapping one another on the back, they evidently thought their work well done.
Maddie almost couldn’t bear to look at the larger bundles of clothing strewn across the field, each a being either in distress or recently released from it. She forced herself back onto the field: One of them could be Kitty. Now it was she who took the lead, pulling them toward the hustings. The two wagons remained, broken flag-staves rising from their beds. The banners were taken or destroyed, the people only taken, she prayed.
The densest number of casualties lay closest to the wagons. Maddie took some to be children, their bodies so small, and then she realized they had been crushed into the earth. At each mound, she looked for Kitty’s auburn curls. She was too weak to look into their faces. A woman, a man, a woman, another woman. Others, Samaritans or fearful relations, also stepped from one to the next, seeking the living.
Kitty.
The curls spilled out from under a man’s coat cut like Nash’s. Maddie swallowed hard, her mouth suddenly too dry to call to her father, who was searching near the other wagon. He must have seen her stop, for he rushed to her side.
“Damn Tory fabric.” He thrust the coat away from her, and then recoiled. Kitty’s lively face held the red marks of a beating, marks that never would bruise. Even with her arms across her belly, parts spilled into the dirt in front of her. She hadn’t been merely killed, she’d been gutted.
Maddie fell into blinding pain all over her body, mirroring Kitty’s wounds. To regain herself, she looked away, up, anywhere, everywhere else. Set her eyes and ears adrift. Rows of houses, all their curtains pulled, blinds closed, doors shut tight. Horse’s harnesses glittering in the sun. The steady tramp of soldiers’ boots melting into a confusion of strides as they were called out of formation. The keening of a man mourning his wreck of a daughter. His tones melting into the moans and cries of other fathers. Her father.
Maddie sank to her knees. The discarded coat lay before her. She picked it up and wrapped herself in it, fastening its familiar buttons. So like Nash’s, she let herself imagine it smelled of him, too. She tried to focus her senses on the memory of that scent, chamomile and musk, to mask the harsher smells of blood and despair. She looked down the field to the horses and their scarlet-plumed masters. Cavalry, against cloggers. The world had no sense of proportion, no measure. She hated the soldiers, and the world they represented. If she’d been a reluctant radical before, she was a full-blooded one now.
Her father’s grief was attracting the attention of one of the soldiers, which could only mean ill. She dared put a hand on her father’s shoulder, only slightly less dangerous than facing those dragoons. “She shouldn’t be in the dirt, like this. Take her to hospital?”
He pushed her away, leaning over the body, a mother hen after the fox has raided the coop. He pulled Kitty toward him, and lurched to his feet, pressing her belly to his. “Out of the way.” Step by staggering step, he carried Kitty across the field, toward the church. He hadn’t gone three dozen steps before his knees folded and he sank to the ground, holding Kitty as Mary does her child in the Pietà sculpture. “I dinnae want your help,” he insisted, his sobs making the words a dirge.
“Your home is more than a mile away. Let me find a wagon, at least.” He nodded, perhaps; she left him there, his shoulders shaking under the pressure of his unshed tears. But not a wagon, nor a coach, nor a carriage was to be found. The hospital wagon transported only the living, and the morgue wagon would only take her there. The sun’s steady glare mocked Maddie, stealing her energy. She weaved on her feet as she went from house to house, closed shop to closed shop. She started calling out, a town crier of death, pleading for final transport.
At last, a man appeared from the courtyard of a house she’d just passed, pushing a wheelbarrow. He dropped the handles, setting the barrow at the edge of the street, and retreated. At his locked door, she called out her thanks and her father’s address.
The church bells rang half past two before she got back to the field with the barrow, and seven before they got Kitty home. Moore had insisted he push her every step of the way, and it took all Maddie’s will just to keep up with even his slow pace. He’d covered Kitty with his own shirt, and wore only his vest. He’d been whipped sometime in the past.
Twice, they had to pull to the side and take shelter in an alley as riders passed by. They had to skirt Shude Hill and Market Street, where shouts and clacking stones and metal warned of conflict best avoided. By the time they reached the cottage in Clock Alley, Maddie felt beaten down to her soul.
* * * *
Maddie forced herself to keep moving, collecting all the pans and buckets in the house to carry to the pump in the courtyard. A neighbor woman sent her boy to help carry them back to the cottage.
After draping his daughter onto the table, Moore collapsed onto the floor, his head hanging so low it nearly touched the swept earth. Maddie fetched the stool from beside the cold fireplace and set it beside him.
“It would help if you hold her hand while I make her ready.”
He pushed himself up and onto the stool, his face a creased mask of sorrow. He gripped Kitty’s good hand and sat silent witness as Maddie folded up the cuffs of her coat and started to cleanse the body. Had her three-year-old face looked so ravaged as she held her mother’s hand while they prepared her for her eternal journey? Her adopted mother.
Dusk deepened into gloom as she worked, first to get the body clean, then to shape it back into her sister. Finally, she asked for a needle and thread. He fetched it for her, but just as she bit off a length of it, he shuddered and retreated back up the stair. She sighed in relief. Now she could light the candles; he hadn’t wanted any light. She wanted this part done as quickly as possible.
Above her head, she heard a click-click-clack, click-click-clack. He must be at the loom, weaving. The rhythm soothed her. She hoped it soothed him.
Kitty and she were so alike. Long legs, fine fingers. They’d slashed at her breasts, but she was so small they’d only taken the tips. Maddie’s breasts ached in angry sympathy. There was little she could do with the cuts to the hands but make the stitches as neat as possible. She could do nothing with the chest, but merely wrapped it with strips from her petticoat.
Finished, she kissed the closed lids of Kitty’s eyes, then her forehead. The sister she never knew she’d always wanted.
She sat on the stool for just a minute before going up to look for Kitty’s other dress. But the click-clack lulled her into a sleep so deep the new nightmares couldn’t touch her.
* * * *
Money had done what his weakened influence could not, and by evening Nash found himself in the best accommodations the New Bailey jail could offer. He could only pray that Maddie was as secure.
The turnkey had recognized him and gone against constable’s orders to install him and some of the others in a largish room on the second floor with six cots and two slop-pails. He’d also given them pen and paper—or rather sold it to them at a usurious rate. Nash had gotten a letter out to Deacon; if only his brother could wield his power to conjure up Maddie.
He should have known it would be Kitty on the hustings. He should have known not to believe Malbanks’s eyes. He should have known to trust Maddie’s good judgment. All the things he should have known filled the space of the room, spilling out along the corridors. What he didn’t know was acid eating him slowly from inside.
Where was she? Was she hurt or frightened? There were no woods to hide oneself in Manchester, but there were two rivers. She’d promised him not to consider it again, but he’d promised in return that he’d never leave her. Would she consider that contract broken? After seeing the carnage of this day, was she—were any of them—thinking rationally tonight?
She must be with her father. He knew Moore wasn’t locked in here; the old reform hand had likely not risked standing on stage. A reporter from London was not so fortunate. Not known to the constables and not believed by the yeomanry, he sat across from Nash penning his own batch of correspondence. Dark curls and an amiable round face offset the sharpness of his gaze.
“It’s a rare thing these days not to carry a stick, or even a cudgel when one walks the streets and byways. My impression is that the people purposely refrained from bringing any such implements of alarm. Is that your impression, as well?”
“The committee told them not to. They counted on the protection of the state.”
“More fool them. You don’t look the rabid radical.”
“Nor you.”
He sighed, all but draping the back of his hand across his forehead. “Bragge.
London Beacon
. So I say.”
“
The Beacon’s
Tory. Or barely Whig. Why report on a protest? Just bloviate against it.”
“Like your Manchester rags? The biggest story in Britain, of course I’m here. Sadly, current circumstances will make it difficult for me to meet my deadline. I never thought this would happen on our soil. We’re not the French, after all.”
“What did you hear of the women?”
“Anyone in the coach or on the hustings arrested or maimed. Three here with us, confusing the guards on the floor below.”
Had Maddie really been in the coach? He couldn’t say for sure now. “Names?”
Bragge looked at the ceiling, thinking. “Two they’re calling Mary Fildes, though neither looks like the lady I met this morning. The other appears very ill—and very pregnant.” His account matched what the turnkey had told Nash. Maddie wasn’t here.
He’d been an idiot to believe Malbanks. The man couldn’t tell an enemy from a rock. It was Kitty in that coach, Kitty on the stands, Kitty dead in the dirt. Maddie might not even have been at the rally. But he knew her better than that. She followed her older sister like a lapdog, hoping for any scrap of love she or her blasted father threw her way. Why was their love so much more valuable than his?
It had certainly cost her more. A marriage, a secure life, and now a sister. Perhaps, heaven forbid, her own life. His mind skittered away from the thought.
Had she read his letter? Had it made a difference? Sitting in here, deprived of his freedom and his power, just as she so often must have felt, he saw how foolish he had been. Why had he forced her to choose between him and her family? It made so much sense politically, and even economically. But woman was a creature of emotion, as was man, if he would but admit it.
To meet others’ expectations, he’d cut out his own heart. When those others were tested, they failed him. Maddie was the true partner, the truthful friend.
He never wanted to see Heywood again. He was glad to be in jail tonight; otherwise he would hunt down Malbanks and flay him with his own sword or, better, with Trefford’s, after he had done with that piece of offal first.
But as the night darkened to chill black, Nash forced himself to face a deeper truth. He was his worst enemy. Those men had followed their own rules, but he’d bent his, trying to stay in their good graces. He had broken his promise to always hold and honor his wife. He hadn’t kept it for even four months.
She’d read the letter; he was sure of it. She’d probably burned it, just like Deacon, just as she should have. What mere words could convince her when she’d seen his true colors in his actions?
The red-orange of dawn promised to lift the chill of the cell’s walls. It would do nothing to cauterize the gaping wound that was his heart.