Page 1 of Cinders and Smoke

Darkshire

A river of yarn cuts Milton in two. On one side: mill owners rest secure in their wealth...and confident that the government will send the militia to put down “revolution.” On the other: workers secure only in knowing that every day is one day closer to the grave, be it from fluff burrowing into their lungs or slow starvation sapping their strength as they work longer for less.

The men of the mills did the only thing they could: they went out on strike. Trouble brewed when the masters imported Irish labor to fill their places at the water frames and looms.

Into this world step three who seek the middle path: Marlborough Mills’ master John Thornton, vicar’s daughter Margaret Hale, and union leader Nicholas Higgins. A dinner at the master’s house is interrupted by a riot that injures Miss Hale—and plunges Thornton into an emotional night. Yet the unexpected counsel of one man guides him to a denouement that draws him toward the light and shapes his future.

“...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 with angry sounds and desperate faces only an hour before.

This was his aerie, his high point where he had always kept a solitary post. The dormer jutted out above slates that cascaded steeply down toward the great courtyard, the basin between the master’s house and the mill. His post was 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 calm 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 of his feet and legs 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 once reserved for the Almighty.[1]

However, as with silvery shillings, what was head on one side demanded a tail on the other. While philosophers long had insisted that the back of a coin need not represent the opposite of the front, humanity’s 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, he was a man blessed with an unusual amount of self-assuredness. That observation would have resulted from his carefully curated efforts in a rough-and-tumble arena marked by innovation and wealth, as well as stagnation and failure. What he presented to his fellow manufacturers was as akin 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 Thornton himself may have left deceptively bright. 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 glazed sheets prevented him from falling—leaping—into the mews four storeys below.

This was the world over which Thornton had no control.

He had tried to exert his authority to compel the men and currents outside Marlborough’s walls to bend to his wishes.

Thornton had failed before…as he had again tonight.

Old Hale would have laughed at my inability to grasp what the Greeks had known so long ago: the sin of hubris. My pride, combined with my arrogance—so like King Oedipus—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 had deepened as the overcast vanished. He inhaled and exhaled in gulps, fogging the glass. He had been unable to regulate himself and calm his tremors since she had been slapped to the ground as if by a giant’s 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 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 reshaped itself, roiling inexorably against lesser edifices while coursing from source to the delta of its discontent. Torches and lanterns flickered within the mob, illuminating disparate features until finally becoming individual men. So, too, the rumbling outcries eventually resolved into articulated grievances. Interpretation vanished as words took meaning from the distorted expressions that transformed the faces of men he had known, if not known, for years.

Thornton recognized this fury, although he was surprised that these men—laborers and loom men—possessed it. He had always believed such primal emotions fueled his rise from the obscurity of a draper’s assistant. He had proven his mettle by scaling the heights from which his father’s disgrace had thrown him. 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 the same impetus and innate urge, would they not have risen from their lesser status to fight for a higher place on the ladder? Or was something else preventing them from taking their place as he had? And, if outside influences were holding these men back, what would happen to him should higher, unseen 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 survival instinct is as old as Adam. Our ancestors feared the lion, and while they would run from one to climb a tree when facing a perilous crossing of a featureless plain, they would use anger, much like the Norse berserker, to assert their will when resisting the big cat.