Page 4 of Cinders and Smoke

“That is no excuse. Those pennies could have bought bread,” Thornton dryly preached.

“Aye, sir, I know that. But it goes a long way ta splainin’ 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’s long-held principles placated Thornton. He could slip back into his traditional role of magistrate to launch the search.

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. Your bully-boys’ll scare th’ women and bairns. Rather than locatin’ one troublemaker, ye’ll make a hundred more.

“If I know Boucher, ’e’s gone ta ground, prob’ly down by th’ river, drownin’ ’imself an’ ’is sorrows in ’nother bottle.”

Thornton quickly granted this concession. His trust in Higgins had grown over the past few minutes, although the man 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 did so because they had to rather than by free choice was foreign to him. John Thornton, a self-made man—or was he—could not conceive of any man bowing so low as to undertake what he despised.

He fell back on 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 taste. 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 exploited his family’s desperation, John recalled little except to hold it up before himself as a shame he would avoid at all costs. He conveniently ignored that there were no spare ha’pennies in the Thornton purse to purchase carriage tickets out of Milton.

A mote about his earlier trials and their similarity to those of Higgins and his men rose to disequilibrate Thornton’s certitude. Something in the man’s posture demanded he ask something that went 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 was not in the fray for his enrichment. Others had sold out their members to the bosses, secure in the belief that they could flee town with the £100 payoff and vanish under a new name on the other side of the country.

Thus, Higgins paused when he understood Thornton expected more than the usual screed about low wages and awful working conditions. Thornton wanted to know: What did these elements of Milton’s status quo mean to the workers?

Nicholas Higgins was uniquely qualified to offer such insight, having seen both sides of the Industrial Revolution.

A child of Yorkshire cottager parents, Higgins had watched them spin 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 tended her kitchen garden, while his father worked his strip of the commons.

Nicky and his sisters lived as children of the countryside do: fishing, picking berries, and harvesting 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 their ancestors had 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 Caribbean sugar plantations and Indian kingdoms. Men who 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 off their leases in produce, now faced demands for cash rents and the abrogation of traditional privileges long believed sacred writ. The new reality was all about money. New landowners, having left their roots in trade behind, were flush with cash to buy 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 starvation on lands that had supported them for hundreds of years, families pulled up stakes and moved to the new industrial towns, drawn by the promise of ample work. Yet, they simply exchanged oppressors by seeking to escape from the new face of exploitation. Feudal masters, whether on the land or in town, again sought to control their labor through force of arms, starvation, or other coercion. Thousands huddled in rapidly exploding slums, finding themselves repressed again.

And the awful truth of Mr. Smith’s equation landed. As more people crowded the towns for steady work and good wages, the oversupply of ready hands brought wages crashing down.

Now, one of those men sought his view on a situation that—to Higgins—seemed patently obvious and the world's natural order.

Higgins took the time to gather his thoughts and to offer his reply in a clear, firm manner that could not be discounted, even though he spoke like an uneducated man. His wife used to chide him for his lazy speech, which came from his fellow workers’ patois. Higgins had been taught at parish day schools in his hometown and during the early years in Milton.

He recalled that his wife would task him, arguing that because he could read, write, and 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.

Higgins framed his reply to Thornton without the sloth that had become his norm. That stunned the mill master. “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 drapers’ work at our home 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. ’Twas lucky for me that the early days saw experienced men like my da getting a good wage. He started out at the mill of old Mr. Watson—that would be the da of Miss Fanny’s Mr. Watson.

“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 the other mills that were showing up across the valley.

“But ’twas not to be, and by the Year Nineteen, I had to go into the shops with the rest of the Higginses. It took all 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?