Fourpenny Flyer (44 page)

Nan was most surprised to see her. She and Sophie Fuseli were taking their usual Thursday afternoon tea together, cosy and gossipy and comfortable, like the old friends they were, when the parlour maid arrived in the garden to announce that Mrs John Easter was asking to see her.

‘Well show her through, do,' Nan said, and, when the maid had gone, ‘'Twill be that Mrs Sowerby again as sure as Fate. Poor Harriet.'

But one look at her daughter-in-law's excited face changed her mind. ‘How now,' she said, intrigued, ‘what's afoot?'

‘We must start a fund for the people who were wounded at St Peter's Field,' Harriet said without preliminary. ‘What
happened there was an iniquity and we must do something about it.'

‘Must we indeed?' Nan laughed. ‘Tell me why, pray.' And was highly impressed when Harriet did just that, describing the good order of the meeting, the fury of the attack, the horror of the wounds and the poverty of the wounded. ‘Now they have nothing,' she ended. ‘No work, no hope, no food, especially when the chief breadwinner is in prison. Some of them are drilling and making pikes out of old spades and forks and suchlike. There is such desperation, Mrs Easter. They are down further than any human creature has the right to be.'

‘How our old friend Mr Paine would have applauded!' Sophie said when the tale was told. ‘Did he not always maintain that the French cry for liberty and equality would spread into England sooner or later? And now here it is, if I ain't mistook.'

Nan looked at the warm flush on Harriet's ardent face and grinned at her. There is fire in her after all, she thought. 'Tis an admirable passion. ‘The matter is already in hand, so it is,' she said. ‘Sir Francis Burdett has formed a committee for the relief of sufferers at the Manchester meeting, and there are others forming, I believe.'

‘Praise God for it,' Harriet said. ‘I will help them in any way I can, if you will tell them so.'

‘Well now,' Nan said, ‘as to that, how if you were to attend their next meeting and tell them all you saw at St Peter's Field?'

‘Oh willingly. Most willingly.'

‘Then we will take another dish of tea together,' Nan said, ‘and Sophie and I will drive you round to Charing Cross Road to see our old friend Mr Place. He knows where all the meetings are being held and will be only too happy to advise, you may depend upon it.' And she rang the little hand-bell that stood beside her plate.

‘I always knew we should live to see a revolution,' Sophie said. ‘Heinrich will be cock-a-hoop to hear all this.'

‘If Frederick don't look slippy,' Nan said, ‘he'll still be hossin' about Europe and miss it all.'

Later that afternoon, when she'd visited Mr Place in his
book-crowded shop in the Charing Cross Road and agreed to speak at four meetings in the next six days, Harriet confided to her diary: ‘I have kept my promise to Mr Rawson. Mr Place was full of sympathy and understood at once how terribly and undeservedly the weavers and spinners have suffered. He is a fine man and will do everything in his power to help. But we must be speedy or those poor children will starve. Perhaps these meetings will lead to a change of heart in the government. I do hope so'. She was so warm with enthusiasm for the new work she'd undertaken that she didn't stop to think where it might lead her.

In fact it was to take her straight back to Bury St Edmunds. But by way of Sir Francis Burdett's gloomy house in Park Place, Lady Mauleverer's expensive blue and gold drawing room in Grosvenor Square, the huge hall of the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand, Mr Penray's crowded untidy house in Tyler Street in Carnaby Market, and a certain Mr Whittle's well-filled orderly sitting room in West Street in Spitalfields, where she made her first speech just two days after offering to help.

She was husky with nerves and so pale that the colour had even drained from her lips, but her audience listened with rapt attention and, to her embarrassment and delight, applauded when her tale was told.

‘Who'd ha' thought it?' Nan said to Sophie, watching as an apricot blush began to warm her daughter-in-law's cheek. ‘Our quiet Harriet become a firebrand!'

‘Still waters, my dear,' Sophie said, fingering her curls, ‘invariably run deep. Ain't I always said so? Consider my Heinrich, so neat and quiet and abstemious and yet he paints nightmares that are enough to curl your hair. He has one upon the easel now that I cannot bear to look upon.'

‘Just so. And Harriet talks of this nightmare and makes us all look upon it.'

‘What will John think of it, I wonder?' Sophie said, still twisting her curls.

John was none too sure what he thought of it. Sometimes, when his colleagues in Easter House spoke
with abhorrence of the massacre and declared that the victims should be helped and the Yeomanry punished for what they'd done, he was proud that his wife was speaking at political meetings to urge people to do just that. But on other occasions, when he listened to lawyers reasoning the need for stronger laws to improve public order, or when he stood in newspaper offices while editors spoke passionately of ‘the danger of the mob' which ‘will lead directly to an armed insurrection if the government don't act', he was afraid of her involvement, just as he'd been on the field of Peterloo, and he wished she would stay safely at home with him, quietly and obediently as she'd done before.

But it was undeniable that this new determined Harriet was far more attractive than the quiet obedient one had been. She might be preoccupied sometimes and she certainly spent far too much time out of the house and far too much answering letters, for these days she had almost as much correspondence as he did, but she was more passionate than he'd ever known her. They made love so frequently and pleasurably that for most of his time he lived in a glow of such well-satisfied desire that all other considerations were trivial.

And then there was the way she'd answered her mother's letter.

It had arrived on the morning after her speech in Tyler Street. She read it calmly and then set it aside without comment to return to her breakfast and the conversation its arrival had interrupted. And that evening, while they were dressing for dinner at Billy's, she showed him her answer.

‘My dear mother,' she had written. ‘Thank you for your letter. I quite understand that you would like to visit my dear Will who, as you rightly say, is your grandson, on Thursday week. Howsomever I feel it only right to tell you that I shall not be at home on that day, nor on many other days during that week and the others following. I have work to be done which it is right and proper I do, since I truly believe I have been called by God to do it,
which is a call that none may deny, as I am sure you agree.

‘Therefore I beg you, do not distress yourself by a wasted journey. I will come to Bury just so soon as ever I may and then I will bring
Will
to see
you,
which is the better way about, for half an hour one morning or afternoon, whichever is available.

‘I am, your obedient daughter,

‘Harriet Easter.'

It wasn't quite the flea in the ear that Nan Easter advocated, but it was certainly a very firm refusal. How much she had changed!

Mrs Sowerby was infuriated by it. ‘“Called by God”!' she snorted. ‘Did you ever hear such blasphemy?'

‘That,' Mr Sowerby said, ‘is what comes of worshipping in the wrong church.'

‘She don't tell us what this precious work of hers
is,
you notice,' Mrs Sowerby snorted. That was the most annoying thing about the letter, for without such knowledge she didn't know whether she could brag about it to the congregation or whether she ought to avoid mentioning it.

And to make matters worse Miss Pettie knew everything about it and started to tell people the moment chapel was over.

‘Speaking at meetings, my dears,' she said. ‘Fancy that! Our Harriet speaking at meetings!'

‘By
particular invitation!
' Mrs Sowerby told them, wresting their attention from Miss Pettie with a scowl and a very loud voice. ‘They think so
highly
of her, you see.'

‘What does she speak about, Mrs Sowerby?' Miss Susan Brown inquired.

Oh how aggravating! What an impossible question! ‘All manner of things, Miss Brown,' she said loftily. ‘All manner of things.'

‘She was at the Peterloo Massacre,' Miss Pettie explained, tugging her curls with excitement. ‘She gave succour to the wounded, so she did, the dear girl, and now the Corresponding Societies and sucklike are all agog to hear what she has to say about it. Such excitement!'

‘Fancy that!' Miss Brown said, very much impressed.

‘Well I don't know about you,' Mrs Sowerby said, extricating herself from the conversation before anyone could ask her any more unnecessary questions, ‘but I have a dinner to attend it. I must go home at once or I simply can't think what will happen.' And she walked down the hill towards her cottage with as much dignity as she could command in her present state of irritation.

‘Thoughtless to the last,' she said to Mr Sowerby when they were safely inside their own front door, ‘Miss Pettie may be told, you notice, but not her own mother.'

‘Oh what a deal we shall have to say to her when she makes her precious visit,' Mr Sowerby said.

His wife snorted. ‘I'll believe
that,
Mr Sowerby, when I see it.'

She was to see it a great deal sooner than any of them imagined.

At the beginning of October, when John was planning what he hoped would be his last trip to open up the Scottish routes, and Harriet had only one more speaking engagement and was looking forward to a rest and the chance to spend more time with Will, Nan Easter received a letter from Miss Pettie asking her if she and Harriet would attend ‘the opening meeting of a Bury St Edmunds relief fund for the victims of Peterloo', and wondering whether Harriet would consider being their first speaker.

‘What think 'ee?' Nan said to Harriet when they met over dinner later that day. ‘I'm game for it, if you are. We could stay in the town for a day or two and visit with Annie.'

‘I shall visit my parents whilst I am there,' Harriet said, and John was pleased to see that she wasn't at all anxious about it. ‘Then they will have no cause to complain of neglect. Half an hour should suffice, would you not think so?'

‘Half an hour would be plenty,' Nan grinned.

So the two women made their plans. They would travel together, taking Will with them, and Nan's maid, Tess, and Peg and Rosie to attend on them.

When John left to catch the early morning coach to Edinburgh, Harriet was happily packing.

‘I do not think there will be any disturbances in Bury whilst you are there,' he said, reassuring himself. One positive result of the massacre was that it seemed to have put paid to riots, at least for the time being. There were plenty of meetings and marches but they were all peaceful. ‘You will take my advice this time, won't you my love, and stay within doors if there is any sign of trouble.'

‘There is no cause for you to worry, John dear.' She smiled at him. Ever since Peterloo she felt she was living a charmed life. ‘Go now, my dear, or you will miss the coach. I have your mother to protect me.'

‘Yes,' he said, ‘you do. That is true.' And it was a relief to him to know it.

He would have been most upset if he'd been at home in Fitzroy Square that afternoon, for at four o'clock a message was sent round from Bedford Square to say that Nan would not be travelling to Bury after all.

‘Mr Brougham is returned from Italy, sick of a raging fever with vomiting and colic. I have sent for a surgeon. He en't in no fit state to be left, my dear, so I fear I cannot journey with 'ee tomorrow. Shall you travel alone? The boy will wait your answer. Your loving Nan.'

The old timid Harriet would have cancelled her journey; the new public spirited one wrote back at once to say that she would travel as planned, ‘for I cannot disappoint the meeting'. But it was a surprise to her that the great Nan Easter was prepared to stay at home and nurse her sick lover, for all the world as if he were her husband. She is tender-hearted after all, she thought, under that fierce manner. How much I have learnt about her in the last few months.

Then she turned her attention to her journey.

It went remarkably smoothly, for it was a fine day and the roads were in quite good condition, there having been just enough rain in the previous week to keep down the dust without making mud. They made good time and
were welcomed in Angel Hill by an excellent dinner and a well-warmed cradle for Will, who was exhausted after his long imprisonment in the coach. Then there was just enough time for Peg to dress her mistress in her plain ‘meeting gown', before Miss Pettie came knocking on the door to escort her to the Athenaeum. She put on her bonnet and her blue redingote and walked briskly across the square. This was to be her thirteenth speech in support of the victims of Peterloo.

It was a blue October evening and the moon above Angel Hill was the colour of clotted cream. Candles bloomed in every unshuttered window of the Angel Inn, and across the square the carriages arriving at the Athenaeum were black swaying shapes tossing their lanterns like yellow will-o'-the-wisps.

I am tonight's speaker, she thought with pride. I have come a very long way since I lived at Churchgate Street.

It was an excellent meeting and produced a rich subscription. Her former neighbours listened with shocked compassion when she described the sights she'd seen on the famous field of Peterloo, and sighed when she told them the story of Mary and Joe and the littl'uns who depended upon them and would starve because they were both too gravely injured to work.

And afterwards the newly formed committee served wine to their guests and gathered about their young speaker with congratulations and offers of assistance. And to her delight and gratification, there among the crush were the two Miss Callbecks, beautifully dressed in their finest silk gowns, their long rabbity faces smiling benignly between the old-fashioned lappets of their brown silk caps.