His silence riled John Roberts more than anything he said would have. “Are you going to answer, or are you going to hide your guilt behind silence?” he roared. “Or will we have to smoke it out of you?” With those words he threw the torch he’d been holding into Mr. Blake’s front garden. The dramatic gesture turned into a slightly less dramatic smolder as bits of dry grass and leaves caught alight and then died away into thin streams of smoke.
Thomas Kellaway’s eyes followed the smoke from next door as it unfurled above them into the evening sky. It decided him. He had seen what could happen to a family when its livelihood burnt to the ground. Whatever the different sides of the argument, no man had the right to set light to another’s property. That much he was clear about. He turned to the humpback man, who was still holding out the ledger. “I won’t sign anything,” he announced.
6
Maisie, still standing in the street just across the gap from the Association men, also looked above her into the sky, now darkened into an inky blue. It was the time of night when the first stars appeared. She found one burning bright directly above her. Then she began to recite:
I wander through each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Though she had spent much of the past two months in bed or sitting by the fire, her voice was strong, and carried through the crowd in the street, who stepped back from her so that she was now standing alone. Her voice carried to the group gathered at Mr. Blake’s door, among them Charlie Butterfield, who started when he saw who was speaking. It carried to her parents in the garden next door, and to Miss Pelham, quivering with nerves on her doorstep. It carried to Mr. Blake, who set his eyes on Maisie’s face like a benediction and gave a tiny nod, which encouraged her to take a deep breath and begin the second verse:
In every cry of every man
In every infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear.
Now her voice carried to Jem and Maggie, who had detached themselves from the crowd and were squatting behind the hedge on the other side of the road from no. 13 Hercules Buildings. Maggie popped up to look. “Damn! What’s she doing?”
Jem joined her and peered at his sister. “God help her,” he muttered.
“What’s this? Quiet, girl! Someone stop her!” John Roberts shouted.
“Leave her be!” a man countered.
“Quick,” Maggie whispered. “We’d better do it now. Careful who you hit, and be ready to run.” She reached to the ground and fumbled about until she found a chunk of frozen horse dung-street sweepers often dumped their findings over the hedge there. She aimed carefully, then flung it hard so that it flew over the heads of the crowd, over Maisie, and landed in the group of men surrounding Mr. Blake.
“Ow!” one of them cried. A chuckle rose from the crowd watching.
Jem threw another clod, hitting one of the men in the back.
“Hey! Who’s doing that?”
Though they couldn’t see the men’s faces, they knew they’d had some effect, for there was a rippling out of the group as they turned away from Mr. Blake and peered into the dark. They threw more dung, and gnarled carrots, but these fell short, into the gap between the men and the street, while a bit of dung thrown too hard hit the Blakes’ window, though it didn’t break. “Careful!” Jem hissed.
Now Mr. Blake began to speak, taking over from Maisie in a sonorous voice that froze the men at his door:
How the chimney sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
Maggie struck lucky, heaving a half-rotted cabbage that hit John Roberts in the head just as Mr. Blake finished the last line. Guffaws and shouts of “Huzzah!” arose from the crowd at the sight. John Roberts staggered from the blow, shouting, “Get them!”
A group detached itself from the Assocation men and began pushing through the crowd toward the hedge. Others, however, mistook where the missiles were coming from and attacked the crowd itself. Charlie Butterfield, for instance, grabbed one of the balls of frozen dung and threw it at a bald, heavyset man in the street, who roared joyously in response and crashed through the Blakes’ front fence, kicking it over as if it were made of straw. Choosing John Roberts as the most vocal and therefore likeliest foe, he promptly head-butted him. This was the signal to all those who had gathered in the hope of a free-for-all to begin throwing whatever they could find-their fists, if nothing else. Soon the Blakes’ windows were smashed, as well as those of their neighbors, John Astley and Miss Pelham, and men were shouting and tussling in the street.
In the midst of the mêlée Maisie stood, swaying from fear and dizziness. She sank to her knees just as Charlie Butterfield reached her. He put an arm around her and half-lifted, half-dragged her to the Blakes’ door, where Mr. Blake still stood watching the riot, which had at least moved out of his garden. Maisie smiled weakly. “Thank’ee, Charlie,” she murmured. Charlie nodded, embarrassed, then crept away, cursing himself for his weakness.
When Maggie saw the group of men approaching the hedge, she grabbed Jem’s arm. “Run!” she hissed. “Follow me!” She bolted across the black field behind them, stumbling over frozen clods and furrows, across old vegetable patches, thrashing through dead nettles and brambles, stubbing her toes on bricks, tripping over netting meant to keep out birds and rabbits. She could hear Jem panting behind her and, farther back, the shouts of the rioters. Maggie was laughing and crying at the same time. “We got ’em, didn’t we?” she whispered to Jem. “We got ’em.”
“Yes, but they mustn’t get us!” Jem had caught up with her and grabbed her hand to pull her forward.
They reached Carlisle House, the mansion at the edge of the field surrounded by an iron fence, and skirted it, coming out to the lane that passed in front of it and led to Royal Row, with its houses and the Canterbury Arms casting faint lights.
“Mustn’t go there-people will see us,” Maggie panted. She looked both ways, then scrambled over the hedge, cursing at the scratches and pricks from the hawthorn and bramble. She and Jem pitched across the road and dived over the opposite hedge. They could hear the huffs and shouts of the men following them, closer now, which spurred them on to run faster again through the new field, which was larger, and darker, with no Carlisle House to light the way-indeed, nothing but field all the way down to the warehouses by the river.
They slowed down now, trying not to crash about but instead to pick their way silently so that the men could not hear them. Above them, stars were pricking more and more holes in the blueblack sky. Jem breathed in the icy air and felt it draw like a knife across the back of his throat. If he weren’t so terrified of the mob behind them, he would have appreciated more the beauty of the sky at this time of the evening.
Maggie was in the lead again, but was going more and more slowly. When she stopped suddenly, Jem bumped into her. “What is’t? Where are we?”
Maggie swallowed, the click in her throat loud in the night air. “Near Cut-Throat Lane. I’m lookin’ for something.”
“What?”
She hesitated, then said in a low voice, “There’s an old kiln somewhere round here, what they use to make bricks. We could hide in it. I’ve-it’s a good hiding place. Here.” They bumped against a squat structure built with rough brick into a kind of waist-high rectangular box, crumbling at one end.
“C’mon-we can both squeeze in.” Maggie ducked down and crawled into the dark hole made by the bricks.