Cinders and Smoke
Don Jacobson
“...every pulse beat in him as he remembered how she had come down and placed herself in foremost danger, —could it be to save him?” - Chapter XXII, North and South
The full moon had vanquished Milton’s perpetual oily haze. The cobbles in the mews below, scummed with cinder slurry, were cast into gritty relief. Empty now, the space had been filled only an hour before with angry sounds and desperate faces.
This was his aery, his high point where he always had kept solitary post. The dormer jutted out above slates steeply cascading down toward the great courtyard that was the basin between the master’s house and the mill.
Not much more than a windowed catwalk, this was where he watched over his kingdoms, both inner and outer.
One set of panes looked back into the factory, giving a bird’s-eye view of the shop floor.
Here was his safety, his security, his place of comfort.
Words like spindle, warp, woof, and yarn formed the placid surface upon which he floated.
Like a mallard, he paddled in this growing pond known as Milton, always moving with a degree of majesty above the waterline despite the fury with which his feet and legs moved below.
Even the complexities of the hulking dobby looms with their mighty Jacquard devices rising toward the rafters did little to challenge his confidence.
Their rumbling power spoke of his dominion over forces which once had been reserved to the Almighty. 111222333
However, as with silvery shillings, what was heads on one side demanded that a tail exist on the obverse.
While philosophers long had insisted that the back of a coin needn’t represent the opposite of the front, humanity and its myth-making explainers had always reveled in the binary: up and down, in and out, left and right, known and unknown.
Assurance and doubt.
And if there was anything an acquaintance could say of the Master of Marlborough Mills was that he was a man blessed with an uncommon amount of self-assuredness.
That observation would have been the result of his carefully curated efforts undertaken in the rough-and-tumble arena characterized by innovation and wealth, stagnation and failure.
What he presented to his fellow manufacturers was as similar to his true self as was the HEIC mark on the outside of an antique tea chest to the aged product inside.
There were those–his mother and perhaps Bell—who might have offered a different character sketch of John Thornton.
His intimates would have added daubs of ochre beneath his eyes and lightly shaded his jutting cheekbones with antimony, thinning his face with a lean look.
Hannah Thornton and the old Oxford don would have darkened features that may have been left deceptively bright by Thornton himself.
Their canvas would portray a young man forced into his majority before his time, revealing the hidden forces that drove him.
Those influences lived beyond the outward-facing transparent fence, formidable yet fragile in its silica simplicity. The glassy sheets prevented him from falling—leaping—into the mews four stories below.
This was the world where Thornton had no control.
He had tried to exert his authority to compel the men and currents outside of Marlborough’s walls to respond in the manner he wished.
Thornton had failed before…as he had tonight.
Old Hale would have laughed at my inability to grasp that which the Greeks had known of so long ago…the sin of hubris. My pride combined with my arrogance has ripped and crushed the most delicate of flowers.
Thornton rested his forehead against the window, its surface cool against his fevered skin.
The night frost deepened as the overcast vanished.
His breath, inhaled and exhaled in gulps, fogged the glass.
He had not been able to regulate himself and calm his tremors since she had been slapped to the ground as if by a giant’s invisible hand.
One moment she was appealing to the mob. The next, Margaret Hale was a pile of rags at his feet.
After-images flickered through his mind. Those memories were not transitory wisps, but rather were profound impressions that echoed down the corridors of his awareness.
How positive he had been in his ability to break the strike. How convinced he had been that the workingmen of Milton were weak and undisciplined, that they would willingly accept his actions as being as inevitable as a fire’s heat.
Hubris!
Once word of the Irish arrivals had reached the Frances Street warrens, the crowds boiled out in their hundreds, angry and restless.
Thornton had watched the black wave approach from another outpost, the upper floor of his house.
The women were safe behind iron-strapped oak shutters… or so he thought.
Hands and arms rose from the dark mass as it restructured itself, roiling inexorably against lesser edifices as it coursed from source to the delta of its discontent.
Torches and lanterns flickered within the mob, illuminating disparate features until they coalesced to become individual men.
So, too, did the rumbling outcries eventually resolve themselves into articulated grievances.
Any questions of interpretation were thrown aside as words were framed by the distorted expressions that reshaped the faces of men whom he had been aware of, if not actually known, for years.
This was an anger which Thornton recognized, although he was surprised that these men possessed it.
He had always believed this primal emotion to be that which had fueled his rise from the obscurity of a draper’s assistant.
He had proven his mettle by dint of the fact that he had scaled the heights from which he had been thrown by his father’s disgrace. Others would have failed.
He was different from those men who had marched to his mill, his monument.
He had to be. If they had possessed the same impetus, the same innate urge, would they not have risen from their lesser status to fight for space higher up the ladder?
Or was it something more, something which prevented them from taking their place much as he had?
And, if outside influences were holding these men back, what would happen to him, John Thornton, should these powers choose to pay closer attention to him, upstart that he was?
Anger and fear are handmaidens. We do not react in anger toward what we do not fear.
This is a survival instinct as old as Adam.
Our ancestors feared the lion and, while they would run from one to climb a tree, if they were faced with a parlous crossing of a featureless plain, they would use anger, much like the Norse berserker, to work their will when resisting the big cat.
The men were angry, but they were angry because they were afraid.
There was a darkness that surrounded all who worked the mills in Milton.
The cloud, mostly hidden, but sometimes taking the form of choking, cinder-filled smoke, was freighted with a foreboding that told all who passed through its mists that exposure spelled a doleful outcome.
This was a miasma that sucked men and women dry.
This after they poured their lifeforce into those caverns from which men like Hamper, Slickson, Watson… and Thornton…extracted their wealth.
But, John, too, was frightened…
Of being found out, of being judged as not being up to the mark.
Cold terror tinted with anguish gripped his guts.
He felt more fear now than ever before in his life.
More than when he found his father slumped atop his desk, bloodstained certificates his final bed.
More so than in that same moment when he realized that his labor was the only way that his mother and little sister would survive.
Even more than when he took it upon his young shoulders to repay his father’s debts.
At each step, he had transformed that fear into the anger which led to his perseverance. He could not turn what he now felt into anything productive.
The threat of the strike to the mill–that manifestation of his intangible self–only served to strengthen his resolve.
Each time, he had known he had the power to prevail. His fear had been forged upon the hard anvil of his life into a billet radiating fearsome intent, scorching all who dared resist.
Thornton wielded his anger against all and sundry.
And they would buckle, if not out of respect, then when their own anger was weakened by rising tides of fear like impurities in a poorly-furnaced bloom.
When the world was measured in feet and yards, pounds and pence, orders and shipments, he was in his element and could force any outcome he desired.
At this moment, in this time where the Irish were locked into the work shed, bent above looms filled with delayed orders, the mill’s future was assured by his ingenuity yet again.
Much as old Watson had decamped to London to petition the entire Government for assistance after the Great Meryton Fire had leveled his mill back in the Year Eleven, Thornton could have –should have, perhaps – looked back upon his efforts with pride.
But Thornton was undone by fear.
He could rail against the unfairness of the Universe. He could mount angry protestations to the Almighty. He could smash the very windows against which he rested his head.
But not one of those outbursts would undo that which had been done.
Margaret Hale had interposed her delicate body between his and those who would have avenged their situations upon him.
Her selfless act showed her compassion for both him and the mob.
Thornton she would protect from physical harm as the brickbat flew from the night.
As for the rioters, that inchoate crowd of snarling faces, she demonstrated that she was a vicar’s daughter and sought to prevent one or all from being stained by the sin of violence.