Page 5 of Cinders and Smoke

“Remember, I am talking thirty years ago when I had to leave school and go onto the loom-room floor with my sisters and parents.

“I am the only one left alive.”

“My folks lasted the longest—the girls only a few years. Fluff got them, just like it’s goin’ ta get my Bessy.” Nicholas broke off as his voice clouded.

A few throat-clearing coughs preceded his litany. “You ask why we hate you, and I’ll tell you.

“All men have dreams. I had mine. Because I had more education than most, I could see that working the machines was not a winning proposition. I knew, though, that without money, without an angel, I would never find my way to an office with windows. I could have been a room boss or even an overseer.

“The world had different ideas. Maybe I picked the wrong owners to follow. I should have fingered men who could land on their feet and not throw everybody out onto the street.

“Dreams die hard, Mr. Thornton, but they do die, and when they expire, they leave behind a mouthful of foul-tasting ash.

“Dreams die, but the need to feed your family and put a roof over their heads does not.

“You work your fingers to the bone, and you wear your labor like a badge of honor, aware that your only reward is another day in these mills where the overseers demand unconditional obedience and punish grown men like misguided bairns.

“Oh, we have another reward: we may earn just enough to starve slowly while watching our wives and children cough up brown gore, their bodies so wasted that they cannot fight to survive!

“We are at the mercy of men like you who would see us as nothing but cogs and wheels in your giant money-making machine. Your underlings see us as beasts and treat us as such, tossing us out the door when we break down.

“You say you are building a better world. I ask you—for whom? I would imagine ’tis for the likes of you, not us. Woe betide any who gets in the way of you and your dreams.

“And I must ask you: Of what do you dream? A golden city or piles of gold?

“You and your ilk are blessed with the riches wrung from our very bones, the muscles of the damned.

“You see us as nothing more than the animals you need to make the cloth you sell to pay for your houses and drink. You would cast us off in an instant and damn us for being lazy if age and injury kept us from working all out.

“Miss Hale considers us men.”

∞∞∞

A staggered Thornton heard Higgins’s voice drop from the ferocity of a Dissenter preacher crying out eternal damnation. Rather, reverence akin to Papists speaking of the Holy Mother colored his words about the young lady. The memory of Margaret’s sanctity and compassion curdled John’s insides as he recalled her response to the trials of Milton’s workers and their families.

Higgins flared back to life, but his ire was subdued. Now he sought to illuminate rather than indict. “I have lived in this town for more than thirty years. Little has floated down the canals that I know nothing about. So, I have a fair idea of your story. You were not born into scandal. That came to you later.

“You, Master John Thornton, fought and reclaimed your honor, your family’s good name. You paid your da’s debts.

“Yet you cannot tell me that you never desired another penny or shilling from the men who controlled your time and sweat. Is that not the way of things—men who labor seek a bit more daily bread?”

Thornton fought back if only to salvage some of his pride. “Then find a second position. I did. I ran deliveries for other shops before my day at the drapers began; then, I would grub a few more pence after hours!”

Higgins appraised the younger man, pursed his lips, and sarcastically replied. “And who might you be to suggest that a man who works fourteen out of twenty-four on your looms ought to find ways to fill the other ten hours with more labor?

“How might you react if I fell asleep below and destroyed machinery worth hundreds?

“Who are you to despise us, to say with conviction that we are trying to steal what is yours? Exactly what is that? The yarn will not spin itself. The fabric will not miraculously fly finished onto the rolls. You would have nothing without men at the stations, women replacing the spindles, and bairns crawling underneath.

“You mill masters accuse us of stealing what is yours? What might that be? The price you get after you conspire to gouge the middlemen, who then must jack up their prices to merchants? The goods become so dear that workingmen cannot afford to buy a shirt cut out of the cloth they made.

“What about your theft of what is ours?

“You are so proud that you ‘reclaimed your family’s honor.’ Yet what have you done with that good name?

“Have you lifted it so that men like Slick and Hamper will sit at your table while plotting to destroy you between the roast and dessert?

“Are you like the slave masters of old, profiting from those without choice, only different from them in that your conscience is clear of the stain caused by owning another human?