Cinders and Smoke #3
Thornton calmed at the other man’s declaration, thought for a moment, and then levelled an accusatory glare at him.
“You know who did this, don’t you?” he coldly quizzed.
This was a test, Higgins realized, that would prove his honesty to a man who doubted any workingman’s veracity.
He shrugged and walked to the window and looked down into the factory, “I do.”
Thornton pressed him, “And…”
Higgins turned back, sadness pulling down his face, “A blue story, that ‘un. Th’ man lost ‘is job, ‘is bairns be starvin’, an’ ‘e is lookin’ at life through the bottom ‘o a bottle ‘o penny gin.”
“That is no excuse. Those pennies could have bought bread,” Thornton dryly preached.
“Aye, sir, I know that” Higgins replied,” But, t’it goes a long way ta explainin’ why ‘e can’t see any way out but throwin’ a rock, feelin’ a bit like King Davey fightin’ the giant…’opeless, ya know.”
Thornton was relentless. He leaned in and breathed, “Who?”
One word, “Boucher.”
The betrayal of Higgins’ long-held principles placated Thornton. He could slip back into his traditional role of magistrate to launch the manhunt.
His musings were interrupted as Higgins spun to face him.
“I know what ye be thinkin’. An’ afore ye go any further, ye’ll be lettin’ us, ‘is comrades, find ‘im. No need ta turn Milton on its ‘ead. Yor bully-boys’ll scare th’ women and bairns. Rather than locatin’ one troublemaker, you’ll end up making a hundred more,” he cautioned.
Then he added, “If I know Boucher, ‘e’s gone ta ground, prob’ly down by th’ river, drownin’ ‘imself an’ ‘is sorrows in ‘nother bottle.”
Thornton easily granted this concession because his trust in Higgins had been growing over the past minutes.
Nicholas Higgins and his animosity toward what Thornton saw as inevitable—that there would be those who built and those who worked—confused the industrialist. The idea that the men who toiled at his looms believed that they were forced to do so by circumstances rather than choice was foreign to him.
He could not conceive of any man choosing to undertake that which he despised.
Rather he fell back onto the entrepreneur’s code about employees: If they do not like it, they ought to find another job or move to a place where they might find employment to their liking. My responsibility is to pay them not to coddle them.
Memory is particularly short in the young, although John Thornton was well past his first bloom.
He gilded the recollections of his time as a draper’s boy, preferring to recall the gratitude in his mother’s eyes when he dropped welcome shillings and pence into her outstretched hands.
Of his anger at his father and the men who would exploit his family’s desperation, he recalled little except to hold it up before himself as a shame he would avoid at all costs.
He conveniently ignored the fact that there were no spare ha’pennies to purchase a carriage ticket out of Milton.
A mote of thought about his earlier trials and their similarity to those of Higgins and his men rose up to disequilibrate Thornton’s certitude. There was something in his next question that demanded a response beyond brutal economic realities.
“Why do you hate us so?”
Higgins was a better man, a stronger one, than many who fought to rise to his position.
He was a true believer and not in the fray for his own enrichment.
So many others had sold out their members to the bosses, secure in the knowledge they could flee town with the ￡100 payoff and vanish behind a new name on the other side of the country.
Thus, Higgins paused when he understood that Thornton was expecting more than the usual screed about low wages and awful working conditions.
Thornton wanted to know what these elements of Milton’s status quo meant to the workers.
Nicholas Higgins was uniquely qualified to offer such insight, as he had seen both sides of the Industrial Revolution.
A child of Yorkshire cottager parents, Higgins had watched them spin the raw wool into yarn and weave it into cloth on the loom that dominated one room of their cozy home.
The draper’s men would come to carry away the finished stuff and settle up.
His mother had her kitchen garden while his father would work his strip of the commons.
Nicky and his sisters lived as children of the countryside do: fishing, picking berries and picking up fallen fruit in the orchards that carpeted the hillsides beneath the crags and moors.
Between their parents’ efforts and the children’s foraging, the Higgins family lived as had their ancestors for generations.
The sun was their clock and the church calendar told their year and lives.
Then came the enclosures.
With the new century, great wealth sloshed about the shires.
Sterling poured in from sugar plantations and India.
Men who had bought and sold for a living overthrew the delicate balance that had governed English life since the Fifteenth Century.
Peasants and yeoman farmers who had worked the lord’s fields and their own strips, paying their rents in produce, now faced demands for cash rents and the abrogation of traditional privileges long believed sacred writ.
The new reality was all about the money, and these new landowners were flush with cash and bought favorable treatment in Westminster.
Little could be done in the face of shire militias, which were moved from town to town in a show of force designed to cow the population.
Faced with the question of starvation on lands that had supported them for hundreds of years, families pulled up stakes and moved to the newly rising industrial towns, drawn by the promise of ample work.
Yet by seeking to escape from the new face of agrarian exploitation, they simply exchanged oppressors.
Feudal masters, whether on the land or in town, now sought to control their labor through force of arms, starvation, or other coercion.
Thousands huddled in rapidly exploding slums, finding themselves oppressed again.
Now one of those men sought his view on what—to Higgins—seemed patently obvious and the natural order of the world.
Higgins took the time to gather his thoughts, to offer his reply in a clear, strong manner that would not be discounted because he spoke like an uneducated man.
His wife used to chide him for his laziness of speech that grew from his fellow-workers.
Higgins had been taught at parish day schools, both in his home town as well as during the early years in Milton.
He recalled that his wife would task him, arguing that, because he could read and write as well as perform the mathematics needed to set up the giant looms, he could have feet in both camps. Each would respect him because he used the King’s English as a tool, not a bludgeon.
He framed his reply without the laziness of tongue that had become his norm and stunned Thornton in the process.
“You must forgive me, sir, if I speak slowly. ‘Tis been some years since I took the time to say my ‘haytches’ and the like.
“To your question… I am at least a third-generation loom-man. My father and grandfather before him took in work from the drapers at our home over in Yorkshire. Guess you could say I have wool in my blood.
“But we had to move off the land when corn prices fell after the Duke beat that bastard. T’was lucky for me that the early days saw experienced men like my da getting a good wage. He started out at Old Mr. Watson’s—that would be the da of Miss Fanny’s Mr. Watson—mill.
“I was able to continue my schooling over at St. Mary’s. My folks hoped I could become a mechanic and design new machines for Mr. Watson and some of the other mills that were showing up across the valley.
“But t’was not to be and, by the Year Nineteen, I had to go into the shops with the rest of the Higginses.
The greater Milton’s population, the more wages dropped.
Eventually, it took every one of us in the mills from five in the morning until eight at night to pay for two rooms. Not much left over to feed two grown-ups and three bairns.
“And you ask why we hate you?
“Remember, I am talking thirty years ago when I had to leave school and go with my sisters and parents onto the loom room floor.
“I am the only one left alive.
“My folks lasted the longest, the girls only a few years. Fluff got them, just like it’s goin’ ta get my Bessy,” he broke off as his voice clouded.
A few throat clearings and coughs later, he picked up his litany, “You ask why we hate you, and I’ll tell you.
“All men have dreams. I had mine. Because I had more education than most, I could see that working the machines was not a winning proposition.
I knew, though, that without money, without an angel, I would never find my way to the office with windows.
I could have been a room boss or even an overseer.
“The world had different ideas. Maybe I picked the wrong owners to follow. I should have fingered men who could land on their feet and not throw everybody out onto the street.
“Dreams die hard, Mr. Thornton, but they do and, when they expire, they leave behind foul-tasting ash.
“Dreams die, but the need to feed your family and put a roof over their heads does not.
“You work your fingers to the bone, and you wear your labor like a badge of honor, aware that your only reward is another day in these mills where the overseers demand unconditional obedience and punish grown men like they are misguided bairns.
“Oh, there is another reward: that we may earn just enough to starve slowly while watching our wives and children cough up brown gore. Their bodies are so wasted that they cannot fight to survive!
“We are at the mercy of men like you who would see us as nothing but cogs and wheels in your giant money-making machine. Your underlings see us as beasts and treat us as such, tossing us out the door when we break down.