Page 2 of Cinders and Smoke

The men were angry, but it was because they were afraid.

A darkness surrounded all who worked the mills in Milton. The cloud, mostly hidden but sometimes taking the form of choking, cinder-filled smoke, was freighted with foreboding, telling all who passed through its mists that exposure spelled a sad outcome. The miasma sucked men and women dry—a toll paid after they poured their life force into those caverns from which men like Hampers, Slick, Watson...and Thornton extracted their wealth.

But John, too, was frightened…

Petrified at being found out and judged as not up to the mark.

Cold terror tinted with anguish gripped his guts. He felt more fear now than ever before. More than when he found his father slumped atop his desk, bloodstained dunning notices his final bed. More than anything else, in that moment John realized his labor was the only way his mother and little sister would survive. Even more than when he took it upon his young shoulders to repay his father’s debts.

At each step, he had turned that fear into the anger that fueled his perseverance. He could not turn what he now felt into anything productive.

The threat of the strike to the mill—that manifestation of his intangible self—only strengthened his resolve.

Each time, he had known he had the power to prevail. His fear had been forged upon the hard anvil of his life into a billet radiating fearsome intent, scorching any who dared resist.

Thornton wielded his anger against all and sundry. And they would buckle, if not out of respect, then when their wrath weakened before rising tides of fear like impurities in a poorly smelted bloom. When feet and yards, pounds and pence, orders and shipments measured the world, he was in his element and could force any outcome he desired.

At this moment, when the Irish hid behind the work shed’s locks, bent above looms filled with delayed orders, Marlborough’s future was assured by his ingenuity yet again. Much as when old Watson had decamped to London to petition the entire government for assistance after the Great Meryton Fire had leveled his manufactory back in the Year Eleven, Thornton could have—should have, perhaps—looked back upon his efforts with pride.

But Thornton was undone by fear.

He could rail against the universe’s unfairness. He could mount angry protestations to the Almighty. He could smash the very windows against which he rested his head.

But none of those outbursts would undo what had been done.

Margaret Hale had interposed her delicate body between him and those who would have avenged their situation upon him.

Her selfless act showed her compassion for both him and the mob. She would protect Thornton from harm as the brickbat flew from the night. As for the rioters—that inchoate crowd of snarling faces—Miss Hale demonstrated that she was a vicar’s daughter and sought to prevent one or all from being stained by the sin of violence.

She succeeded in the first and failed—although one might argue that a martyred saint who did not prevent her murderers from completing their crime was equally successful—in the second. Those who raised their hand against the purest of hearts would find the abyss and eternal damnation.

Thornton absently rubbed a bruise darkening the back of his left arm. He did not know how he had received it. Whatever its source, this was no badge of honor, for she had been laid low within inches of his protection.

His miserable attempt to exercise the sheer force of his will to prevent the marchers from breaking through his gates illustrated the poverty of his influence over the broader affairs of men.

He was a fraud.

All he had believed in—that bare knuckles were the way of business and, thus, life—was counterfeit. Where he had attempted, like King Canute, to hold back the tide, she had floated above those cobbles like Eve, Venus, or Mother Mary, her hands lifted toward the crowd in the eternal gesture of supplication.

He arrogantly shouted at the mob, his ire grounded in his rights as master. Margaret barely lifted her voice above the roar, begging men subjected to the worst cruelties to rediscover their humanity.

A tiny woman proved in a minute of indescribable courage as she leaped from behind his protective bulk that a life without love was thin porridge. Her ardor was not the idealized romances of men and women, but something laden with the unique charity that had resonated through every organized faith for the past eighteen centuries.

For her efforts, because of her love for all who had crowded the mews between factory and house that night, she lay small and helpless on the divan in his office, her blood staining her dress.

His life was in tatters. His anger did not flutter high above his putative turrets. Rather, it lay in the gutter, cast down after other weapons had snapped its shaft. His unworthiness in the light of her angelic perfection left him without an anchor in the swirling tides that pulled at his limbs.

If Miss Hale’s actions were not enough of a punishment, his preconceived notions had taken another telling blow. For all his pretensions of superiority, he, John Thornton, the man who had lifted his family back into Milton’s first circle and had made Marlborough Mills a mighty force, was not the one who saved her from falling beneath the trampling boots of enraged workers.

No, that honor belonged to Nicholas Higgins, the arch-nemesis of Milton’s laissez-faire manufacturers. Those broad men, gold chains stretched across bulging waistcoats, wanted the government to stay out of all their affairs—to leave them alone. They were outraged that the Factory Acts had limited the hours they could force their child employees to work on a given day. They found it radical and dangerous that working men and women would demand higher wages rather than accept the cuts that would expand mill profits. Yet oddly, for all their protestations about Parliament’s long nose, they found comfort in calling upon the militia when their laborers objected too strenuously.

Nicholas Higgins, the union’s first man, was the Milton stalwart whose iron-strapped backbone would not let these ‘Christian’ gentlemen have their way without resistance. Their fervid hatred of Higgins for presuming to point out the industrialists’ original sin was akin to that heaped upon the Prophet Elijah by Ahab and Jezebel. And, if one believed, as Thornton did, that every man could be his own master if he had only the gumption, Higgins should have served as the cardinal example of the weakness of spirit and greed ascribed to all who worked for wages by those who profited from that labor.[2]

Yet, contrary to his presumed grasping nature, when havoc exploded all about, Higgins kept his head. Unlike Thornton, paralyzed by the violence against Miss Hale, the grizzle-haired man had effortlessly scooped Margaret into his arms as she slid toward the coal-slimed cobbles, the trickle on her forehead glistening chocolate brown in the full moon’s watery light.

The crowd’s taste for blood was slaked at the sight of Margaret’s, perhaps proving that they had only been seeking vengeance upon one of their oppressors. After Higgins, trailed by Thornton, vanished through the mill’s swiftly bolted portal, the mob evaporated like Milton’s ash-gray April snows.

Thornton was ashamed of himself. His worldview was built upon shifting sands, and that realization also tried him.