Angel Meadow Page 29

  “That looks good enough ter eat,” she twinkled at him. She who despised all men, twinkling at one of them! If her family could see her they would be stunned but if it helped to get her a job, something to keep them going, something to hold on to until this bloody war in America was over, she’d smile and twinkle until her face ached!

  The man looked bewildered for a moment, for was that not just what he was about to do then he saw the joke and laughed delightedly.

  “Yer wanner try one,” he said, winking at her with a wealth of meaning, then turning to beam at his open-mouthed companions. It was noticed that the landlord’s wife was watching this small interplay with great interest.

  “I will, if Mrs . . . Mrs . . . ?”

  “Mrs Ainsworth,” she offered stiffly.

  “If Mrs Ainsworth’ll sell me one. I’ve had no breakfast this morning.”

  But Mrs Ainsworth was not so easily taken in by a pretty face – if you overlooked the scar – and a warm smile and her stance, hands on hips, said so. Ignoring the pies she went straight into battle.

  “There’s no work ’ere, lass, only cleanin’ an’ I’m sure—”

  “I’ll take that, Mrs Ainsworth. I need a job. I have a child to support.”

  “Where’s yer ’usband?”

  Nancy lifted her head and dared Mrs Ainsworth to trifle with her.

  “I have none.”

  “I see,” Mrs Ainsworth smirked.

  “No, you don’t, Mrs Ainsworth. Ever since a man gave me this,” pointing to the scar on her cheek, “I’ve had nowt to do with men like him. But I can be cheerful and polite to anyone who is the same with me which is all that is needed. Don’t you agree, Mrs Ainsworth?”

  She was telling Ginny Ainsworth that she’d have no trouble with Nancy Brody if she’d give her a chance.

  Mrs Ainsworth studied her, liking what she saw, though for a different reason than her husband. The reference to the chap who had smashed her face was not lost on her. Not a husband, that was for sure, but if all the lass was going to do was scrub floors and wash pots she could surely be kept out of mischief, since there were always men who would try to coax her into it. A barmaid had to be saucy, pert, inclined to giggle, which you could see was not this woman’s style, but then a scrubber of floors and a scourer of pots had no need of such accomplishments.

  There was a long silence and the men at the tables found they were holding their breath.

  Then, “When can you start?”

  “How about now?”

  “Yer’ll find a bucket in’t scullery and soaps on’t shelf ter’t right o’t back door. Passage needs a good goin’ over an’ if yer shape, when Bella – she’s barmaid – is on ’er day off, I’ll try yer be’ind’t bar. An’ when yer’ve done there’ll be one o’ these pies keepin’ ’ot for yer.”

  They managed, just! The lease on the factory was given up and the sewing-machines, apart from one, returned to Oldham, most of them almost paid for, which was a bitter blow since it meant they would have to start at the very beginning again when better times came. Mr Bradbury of Bradbury and Company was quite desolate, for he had taken a great liking to Miss Brody and Miss Williams, who were both ladies fallen on hard times, but he had assured them that when good times came again, which he was sure they would, he would do his best to let them have their machines back at a very reasonable price. He himself was in a similar position, for who wanted to buy or rent a sewing-machine when there was no decent material to sew on?

  Those girls who were left after the closure of the factory were sadly let go to find work elsewhere, which would be hard, and most, like their families, would be on poor relief by the month’s end. By the year’s end, December 1862, half a million cotton workers in Lancashire were in the same condition: despite the fact that many “blockaders” managed to bring in thousands of bales of raw cotton, it was not enough. In Manchester and many of the cotton towns around the city, whole families were close to starving and had it not been for the good-hearted altruism of many Manchester men, mill owners who lost money every day of the week, many of them would have gone under. It was said that Edmund Hayes had lost his health and will to live as his businesses struggled to survive and had it not been for his elder son, Joshua, who had become as good a man of business as the old man, they might have lost everything they had. Despite this, young Mr Josh, as the older men still called him despite being the virtual head of the firm, and other mill owners of like mind made allowances or loans to their hands, ran soup kitchens without which many of them would have starved and did not press for cottage rents. Schools were opened for unemployed men, many a weaver gaining a decent education through the adversity of the cotton famine. Some learned shoe-making and other trades and never went back to their old jobs.

  The gentry, Mrs Edmund Hayes among them, helped in the soup kitchen her son had opened and sat in classes of young girls where they were taught to sew. She formed a committee to raise a special fund to release from pawn the clothes and bedding of the distressed workers. Meetings were held in Manchester Town Hall with a view to extending loans to unemployed operatives and by the end of 1862 there was a relief committee, not only in Manchester but in almost every town in Lancashire. On reading of the plight of the mill workers financial help came from London and even from as far as the northern states of America who must have felt somewhat to blame.

  The one remaining sewing-machine was installed in the parlour, the good furniture, which was held ready to pawn should it get to that, pushed back against the wall. Nancy had decided that any cloth they could manage to purchase, which was when Hayes or one of the other mills in the town had got their hands on some raw cotton, should be made up by Mary. She didn’t want her sister to be wandering about Manchester searching for work, she said firmly, not adding that she thought her sister too immature, too sheltered, if you liked, to be out on her own. Mary sewed the cheap, good-quality baby clothes, the chemises and petticoats, the work shirts and vests that had been such good sellers when they had started out. It was not good enough for Hetty Underwood, who still managed to keep open her shop, but it was sold on the market stall behind which Jennet stood four days a week.

  They managed, just, and each night Jennet prayed to her God that the war would soon be over, that they would all keep healthy and strong, for it only needed one of them to fall ill and the whole pack of cards would tumble about their ears. Nancy merely smiled grimly and looked at her chapped and chilblained hands which her new position in life had caused.

  21

  He watched her come up the stairs from behind the pillar where he was hidden from her sight, tall, slender – was she thinner than the last time he had seen her? – her back straight and graceful, her fashionably bonneted head held high. Beside her was her companion, Miss Williams, without whom she would not dream of venturing into this business world of gentlemen. She might not have been born a lady but she acted like the one she had worked so hard to become. She spoke to Miss Williams, bending her head a little, for she was six or eight inches taller and they both laughed. She looked serene, calm, composed, totally at her ease and he was not to know that her pulses raced, her heart was in her throat so that she could hardly breathe and her stomach was churning as it did every time she passed through the wide doorway of the warehouse.

  In the year since the civil war in America had begun the average weekly consumption of four hundred-to five hundred-pound bales of cotton had dropped from around fifty thousand to fewer than twenty thousand but somehow Josh had managed to get his hands on a small share of it. Every week since the crisis had begun he himself had made the journey to Liverpool and the Exchange Building, along with dozens of other agents and mill owners from all over Lancashire, all with the same objective in mind. The hope was that a blockader might have slipped out of one of the ports of the cotton states of America, bringing a cargo of precious cotton to the distressed county of Lancashire. Josh had a man in Liverpool, a man paid solely for the purpose of hanging about the L
iverpool docks to watch for ships, many of them steam-powered now, that carried the eagerly awaited bales of raw cotton. His vigilance had paid off and a couple of times he had managed to get hold of enough to keep his spinning mill and his weaving shed occupied on a part-time basis. Whenever more cotton was available full time production was resumed.

  The cargoes of cotton, most shipped from Charleston which was the only port still unblocked by the union navy, had been steam-pressed before it left the port in order to squeeze the largest volume of cotton into the smallest possible space on the ship carrying it. The solid bales were then jammed into the hold with such force that Josh had heard the deck planking on some ships had been forced up. Even so, more were piled up on deck, three bales high, and a wall of cotton was built round the helmsman to protect him from bullets and shell splinters in the running fights that often ensued.

  So was the precious cargo brought into Liverpool, the ships that carried it taking back cloth for uniforms, buttons, threads, boots, stockings, medicine, salt, paper, quinine, candles, soap, preserved meat and tea, all the goods that were in short supply in the beleaguered southern states, the rewards on these items, among others, so rich the blockader was willing to take the enormous risks to get them.

  Josh had been lucky at the beginning of the month, arriving in Liverpool as a steam ship of the Hemingway Shipping Line had limped into Liverpool Bay. The bales of raw cotton she had carried had hastily been unloaded and transferred to the cotton sales room on the third floor of the Exchange Building ready for the buyers and Josh had been there among the huge crowd waiting to get their hands on it.

  Cotton spins into hanks approximately eight hundred and forty yards in length and from a pound of cotton a hundred hanks can be spun. Depending on the fineness of thread required, the width of the cloth, the length of the piece, the pattern, and the speed of the loom, many thousands of yards come from one bale of raw material. Over three million such bales had been imported in 1860. It was considerably less now! Josh had managed to procure enough bales, each containing four hundred to five hundred pounds of raw cotton, to keep his almost sixteen thousand spindles working for a fortnight at full time and the cotton yarn woven from them was at this moment being taken up to the first-floor salesroom of his warehouse where a scramble would then take place among the buyers.

  He watched her hungrily, keeping well out of sight. It was almost a year since the day his mare had ridden her down in Market Street. Almost a year since his arms had held her and she had allowed it and in that year barely an hour went by when his thoughts had not drifted back to that moment. He considered himself fortunate that when he was conducting his affairs with other cotton men he had enough willpower to relegate her to the back of his mind, tearing himself apart with the hope that as time moved on it would become easier to forget her. Not if you spend your time hanging about like a besotted schoolboy for a glimpse of her, his foolish mind whispered to him, and in his quiet corner he smiled wryly to himself, for it would be easier to make the bloody rain stop at his command as miss the chance of seeing her, if only for a moment or two. God only knew what would have happened to his spinning-rooms and weaving sheds and all the processes that took place in his mill between one place and the other; to his warehouse and all the other concerns he had turned to recently had he not got a good grip on himself at such times. It might be said that his work, the long days he spent in his mill and warehouse, and his young son who was the hub of his life, were all that kept him from going mad with wanting her.

  Just after Christmas his father and mother, on the advice of his father’s doctor, had taken a house overlooking the sea at Lytham on the Lancashire coast. It was a pretty little fishing village, one street wide with no more than a handful of dwellings where the air was clear and wholesome. His father’s lungs, ravaged by forty years of the smoke and filth that belched from Manchester’s mill chimneys, spewing their foul fog over the whole city, obscuring the sky and covering every building with soot, had become so weakened that every winter his heart grew more weary as it struggled to cope with his efforts to scrape air into his diseased lungs. It was a mill worker’s affliction which cared nought for a man’s rank, whether he be owner or operative. The same engine fumes, the same factory smoke, the same six o’clock trek to the mill yard in the bitter depths of winter were killing him as they did them. He could barely speak at times as his exhausted lungs laboured to take another breath and so, reluctantly, he had given in to his wife’s agonised pleas to spend at least the winter in the small but elegant house on the seafront at Lytham, leaving his empire, if only temporarily, he made it plain, in the hands of his son. Their daughter, Millicent, went with them, since it would not have been deemed proper to leave a young, unmarried woman alone and unchaperoned in the company of only her brother.

  It was raining, a thin drifting drizzle which misted the rooftops and partially obscured the busy traffic in a slanting pall of what looked like smoke. Pedestrains scurried along the pavements and across busy Moseley Street, jumping puddles, dangerously threatening to take out an eye with an injudicious umbrella. Those unprotected had their backs bowed, their heads bent into the rain, intent on getting wherever they were going with the greatest possible speed as though the quicker they moved the less wet they would become. The rain dripped from gutters and window ledges and the roofs of hansom cabs, forming great stretches of rainwater on the road. It sprayed up as vehicles sped through them, drenching even further those on the pavement who were not fast enough to get out of the way. There were heavily loaded waggons, drays, horse-drawn omnibuses, four-wheelers, even a curricle or two, for they were a great favourite among men about town, and as they cut through the downpour fists were shaken and the language was ripe.

  At the top of the stairs he watched as she and Miss Williams paused, helping each other off with their waterproof capes, shaking their umbrellas, then smiling pleasantly at a member of his staff who hurried forward to unburden them. They seemed to think it quite normal, unaware that every man in the warehouse, from the humblest boy in the basement where the packing was done, the clerks in the offices who dealt with invoices and delivery notes, up through the floors where the sampling was done, to the senior warehouseman who was expected to supervise it all, had been charged with making the purchase of Miss Brody’s cotton yarn as smoothly flowing as possible.

  Keeping among the crowds of buyers, and there were a great many, he followed the two women to the sales floor where his warehouseman had stretched a great sheet of clean white cloth on the floor and placed the finished pieces across it. She and Miss Williams walked round the edge of the cloth, and he was annoyed to see that the men who had come here to snap up as much of his cotton as they could cared nought for the fact that she was a woman, a lady, and did not politely stand aside to let her through. She was a woman trespassing in their world and though most of them were accustomed to seeing her by now, if she was jostled then it was her own fault, their attitude seemed to say, and Josh could do nothing about it. His own men he could order to treat her respectfully, to make room for her where they could, to protect her from the rough bustle of the male buyers but he had no power over the buyers themselves. He wanted to stride over to where she and Miss Williams were struggling to sample a piece of fine cotton, elbowing aside the men who were attempting to do the same. To tell her to go and wait in his office where his Mrs Duckworth would fetch her and Miss Williams a dainty tray of tea or coffee, while he himself would personally fetch all the pieces she wished to purchase, have them packed and delivered to wherever she wished them to go, which he knew by previous delivery notes was her home in Bury New Road. He wanted desperately to help her, to smooth her path, for he was well aware that this cotton crisis, this cotton famine had wiped out her successfully growing business. That she had returned all her machines bar one to the manufacturer in Oldham and that somehow she was keeping her family on this fraction of cotton she bought from him and made up into garments which Miss Williams sold on the mark
et. There was not much he didn’t know about Nancy Brody. He was kept well informed by discreet men who had his ear and if she would have let him he could have made her life so much easier but he knew categorically that she would not allow it. So he did it secretly, making sure that whenever she came to his warehouse there was always something for her. That no matter how ferocious the struggle for his cotton became, she never went away empty-handed.

  Even in the mêlée that was taking place over the square of white cloth and the cotton pieces that had been thrown down on it, she managed to look elegant, womanly, a lady going about her business with the least possible fuss, among the squabbling crowd who were like schoolboys fighting over a bag of sweets, or so her curling lip seemed to say. She wore a gown of dusky rose wool, the skirts wide, the bodice well fitted to her high, firm breasts. Her waist was tiny, supple and there was a thoroughbred arch to her back. Her bonnet, a marvel of dusky rose satin, ruched under its brim with cream muslin, was small and at the back of her head her hair was drawn into an intricate chignon which made her cheekbones appear higher and caused her great golden eyes to slant upwards a little at their corners like a sleek and haughty cat. The hairstyle and the small brim of the bonnet served to detract from the scar on her cheek and there were more than a few gentlemen there who made it evident that when they had finished their business they would be glad to further their acquaintance with her.

  She was having some difficulty in attracting the attention of his warehouseman who was busy in the middle of some altercation with two buyers who both, apparently, wanted the same pieces. A man in a tall top hat and a rather shabby black suit was doing his best to remove from her hands the piece she had evidently decided on and, without thinking, Josh strode round the periphery of the room and, shouldering aside the two buyers who were taking up his warehouseman’s time, spoke sharply to him, nodding in Miss Brody’s direction.