The Devil's Horse

Book 16: Morland Dynasty

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

1820: the landscape of England is undergoing sweeping change as the country pioneers the steam-driven machine age.

The Morlands, too, face change: Cousin Africa returns from St Helena to startle society with her unconventional ideas; Lucy brings her sons home from their Grand Tour, brimming with ideas for their future. In Manchester, Sophie and Jasper meet fierce oppostion to their plans for re-housing the factory hands; while in London, Rosamund enters a bizarre agreement with her husband Marcus, with bitter consequences.

And at Morland Place, James and Heloise watch their two sons approaching manhood. Benedict delights equally in love and locomotives, while Nicholas, the heir develops a taste for more unusual pleasures- and an impatience to claim his inheritance.

Release date: August 25, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 496

Sample

Flowed seemed to be the wrong verb for the River Irwell where it passed between the mills: it toiled between its grim banks, its waters black and stinking and laden with detritus, the unfiltered outpourings of privvies and
tanneries, glue factories and soapworks. Between the river and the factory walls was a sad strip of earth where no grass grew,
a footpath in keeping with its surroundings, as devoid of natural life as the black water or the blackened walls.


The man who stumbled along this footpath cared nothing for that. He was drunk, and meant to be drunker as soon as he had found
a place to hide himself. He was a thin, undersized, shabby creature; pale under a layer of dirt that had ingrained itself
so that his skin had the characteristic greyish patina of poverty. His clothes were hardly more than rags held together with
dirt. His wooden shoes had worn a ring of ulcers on his feet which were far beyond healing now. He had a bad gash on his left
palm which was wrapped around with a piece of rag. He had done it over a fortnight ago but it would not heal either, and where
it had oozed day after day, now it had started to swell and send hot throbs of pain up his arm.


The man’s name was Jack Flanagan, though it was a long time since anyone had used it. There was no-one to call him by it now.
He’d had a wife and five children back in Ireland, a mother and a father and two brothers. They were all gone now. He was
alone, and he was the last of them.


Hughie went first, his younger brother. Hughie said he was going to walk to Galway and get work on a ship going toy America. He said he’d come back one day with his pockets full of gold, and buy Ma a silk dress and a green umbrella. Ma had
cried, knowing she’d never see him again. Hughie was the one she loved best out of them all.


She and Daddy died within a month of each other, the winter a year after Hughie went — died just of being old and tired and
not being able to care about anything any more. The baby went that winter too like a sparrow dropping off a twig, such a very
little baby. They’d called it Hughie, trying to make it up to Ma, and she’d pretended to be pleased. Mary cried when the baby
died. She did it silently when she thought Jack was asleep, but he knew all the same. He could tell by the way her shoulders
hunched.


She didn’t cry when Cathie died next winter. Cathie was their eldest, eight years old, a good girl and a hard worker. She
was a dairy maid at the farm down the hill at Claremorris, and never complained though her hands were often cracked and raw
from milking cows in the open fields in all weathers. She didn’t complain that her chest hurt her, and only when she was too
weak to get out of bed one morning did they know she was ill. The priest said it was pneumonia. He closed her eyes and gave
her absolution, and then complained bitterly because they had no money to pay him, only a loaf of bread and a tiny bit of
bacon, their last.


That was a hard winter, the hardest he remembered in the old country. There was never enough to eat, no matter what they did,
or how hard they worked. The last of the potatoes went, and then there was nothing but the scrapings from the flour bin and
whatever they could glean from the hedges.


Then one day Con, his elder brother, had come back with a chicken. It wasn’t much of a chicken, all skin and bones, but Jack
was worried anyway.


‘I found it wandering loose in the lane,’ Con kept saying; and then, ‘For God’s sake, Mary make some soup out of it and feed
those children. I can’t stand looking at their staring eyes day after day.’


They all had something off that wretched bird. Never did a chicken go so far amongst so many. But Jack had been right to be
afraid: it had been stolen all right. Con had gone to a farm a long way off, and taken the oldest and scrawniest bird hoping no-one would miss it; but two days later they came and took Con away and put him in prison, and then they hanged him.


That was when Jack decided they had better emigrate. He and Mary and the three children packed all they had into two bundles
and walked all the way to Dundalk. There they sold the only thing they had of value — a gold chain given Mary by her grandmother
— and bought passage to Liverpool. It was the autumn of 1818. The factories were on full-time working, and they’d all managed
to get work, all five of them. They found a room to live in — shared with an old couple, but a blanket hung across the middle
divided off their half and they were eating every day.


The work was hard, especially on the little ones, but at least they were indoors in the warm through the winter. But then
in the spring came the slump, and one by one they were laid off. No work to be had anywhere, no wages — no food. Someone said
there was more chance of something in Manchester, so they packed their bundles and walked there; but it was no better. They
got a day here and a day there, not enough to keep them from starvation. First their youngest died, little Brigid, just five.
She’d eaten something, they never found out what — some filth or other, maybe just a sod of earth — to keep the pangs of hunger
away, but whatever it was, it poisoned her. She writhed in agony for hours, but they couldn’t save her.


It was the worst time. To watch your children starving to death and not to be able to do anything to save them is enough to
break any man. The children’s bones stuck out as though they might break through their skin, and they huddled together in
silence, too listless even to cry, only their eyes moving, looking up in automatic hope when Jack came in from his fruitless
searches for work. In the end they didn’t even look up. It was hard to know when they died, it made so little difference to
them.


The next year things got better and there were jobs again — for Mary, but not for Jack. They didn’t want men in the factories,
only women and children, so Mary went to work, and he lay all day on the bundle of rags they called a bed in the dark, stinking
cellar room they called a home and waited for her to come back. There was nothing else to do. When she did get back every night, she was so tired after fourteen hours
standing at the jenny that she was no use to him or herself.


He talked sometimes about maybe going back home — if they were going to be miserable, he said, they might as well be miserable
in their own country — but she was too weary to care. She said that standing all day gave her pains in her back. One morning
when she tried to get up to go to work she gave a terrible cry and fell back down. A savage pain in her belly, she said: she
lay hunched up all day, crying and moaning and sweating with pain. By noon she had a fever too, and by evening she was delirious.
In desperation Jack went up to the street and hammered on the door of the people who lived above them, begging them for help.
The old woman came and looked at Mary and shook her head. She said she thought Mary must have ruptured something inside, something
female. Nothing anyone could do, she said, and went away quickly. Mary lived two days. If only he’d had a gun, he’d have shot
her, to put her out of her pain.


That was a year ago. Since then he didn’t really remember much about his life. There was no regular work for him. He stole
to keep himself alive, and when there was nothing to steal, he went hungry. He slept where he could, and there had been nights,
many of them, when he had laid himself down on the bare earth in the shelter of a wall.


Now and then he got a day’s work, and when he got any wages he spent them on drink. It seemed the only thing to do. He felt
ill and light-headed most of the time, and he had sores that wouldn’t heal. He thought he was probably dying, and he wasn’t
sorry. He had no reason to live, now all those he cared about had gone. When a man loses even his name, he thought, he has
no business staying alive. God could take him as soon as he liked.


This would be a good night for it, he thought as he stumbled along beside the river. He had picked a man’s pocket in Grape
Alley — almost recklessly, for it was daylight and there were plenty of people around and he hadn’t been careful. But with
the perversity of things in general he had got away with it, and found himself safely in possession of a leather purse, which
proved to contain some tobacco and a strike-a-light in one compartment, and several coins in another.


It seemed like a gift from God to him: tobacco, and enough money to buy food and drink. One last taste of human pleasures
before he went to meet his Maker. He bought a plate of faggots from a street-vendor and gorged himself almost to sickness,
and spent the rest on drink. Now with a bottle of spirits and the tobacco in his pocket, warming his thoughts like young love,
he was looking for a place to spend the night and consume them.


His luck held out. He found a building with a broken window on the ground floor — newly broken, by the look of it, so perhaps
undiscovered by the owners. He managed — not without difficulty, for his swollen hand was almost useless — to get through
and found himself in a storeroom piled to the ceiling with bales of cotton.


It couldn’t be better; it was almost luxurious. He took a little time to rearrange the bales to make a space in the centre
so that when he crawled inside and pulled the last bale after him, he could not be seen by any watchman who might discover
the broken window and come to look around. Here he might stay for some time, several days perhaps, warm and snug and safe
with his bottle and his old clay pipe, until either he died, or they pulled out the bales in the natural course of things
and discovered him. He rather hoped the former would happen first. It was so nice here, he really didn’t want ever to have
to leave.


Jack Flanagan crawled into his nest and loosened one of the bales to make something soft to sit on, and with a sigh of comfort
he pulled out the cork from the bottle and lifted it to his lips. You can come for me any time, he saluted the Angel of Death
through the fumes; only it would be nice if you’d wait until I’ve finished the bottle and smoked a pipe or two. But if you
can’t wait, so be it. I’m in no case to argue any more.


Sophie and her friend Prudence Pendlebury came out from Jackson’s Court into Water Lane with a sense of relief. Water Lane
ran parallel with the river, a gloomy street flanked on both sides by mills, between whose fortress walls were crammed narrow courts and alleys of grim dwellings. Sophie had once heard them spoken of as ‘teeming with life’, but as far
as the human inhabitants were concerned, teeming was far too active a verb. The only things that teemed in a place like Jackson’s
Court were rats and bugs.


Sophie’s carriage was waiting for them a little way along the road, and the two women turned towards it and began picking
their way through the mud, lifting their skirts carefully and trying to avoid the human and animal excrement. Above them the
smoke from the mill chimneys hung on the air like winter fog, through which the sun could be seen only as a yellow smudge
as it moved across the sky. The mill hands who lived under the shadow of the chimneys never saw more of the sun than this,
Sophie thought; in winter, when they began work before sunrise and finished after sunset, they saw nothing of it at all.


‘Sophie, you’re not listening to me at all,’ Miss Pendlebury complained.

‘I’m sorry, Prudence. What did you say?’

‘I said that I don’t believe the Keenans’ sickness can be typhoid. That rash on the baby’s stomach isn’t typical. I think
it’s something they’ve eaten. There’s simply no way of knowing what they put into the bread at that bakery in Moss Street.’


‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Sophie said. It was another worry amongst the many that when the poor had money for food, what they
were able to buy was as likely as not to be adulterated. Last year Frederick Accum had published a treatise on the subject,
and Prudence had acquired a copy. It spoke of ‘wheat flour’ which was a mixture of inferior grain and ground beans whitened
with alum; ‘porter’ blackened with any number of noxious substances and made bitter with ginger, copperas, quassia, even sulphuric
acid...


Sophie dragged her mind back to the Keenans. ‘You don’t think we ought to ask Dr Hastings to call, just to be sure?’

‘Oh no, not Dr Hastings,’ Prudence said firmly. ‘His time has too many demands on it as it is. It’s so good of him to visit
these people at all, I feel obliged only to refer the most serious cases to him.’


‘Everything we’ve seen today is serious,’ Sophie said sadly.

‘Nevertheless, Dr Hastings is a rare resource, and we ought to spread him thinly.’


‘Oh Pru! But I know just what you mean.’ Sophie sighed. ‘No matter how often I come here, I can’t get used to it. They live
such terrible lives, and there’s so little we can do.’


‘The Augean Stables,’ Prudence said drily. ‘In more senses than one.’

‘It’s the smells I hate the most. They seem to coat the inside of your throat so that you can’t get rid of them.’

‘But you do follow Dr Hastings’ advice when you get home, don’t you?’

‘Yes, don’t worry. I’m very careful. My clothes are all hung out to air, and I breathe aromatic steam for half an hour. It
can only be my imagination that the smell lingers. Do you think I would risk Jasper’s life, and little Fanny’s?’


Prudence gave a grim little smile. ‘If anything happened to you or to Fanny, I rather think Jasper would murder me. My life
is in your hands as well.’


‘Oh Prudence!’ Sophie laughed. ‘Jasper would never hurt a fly whatever the provocation.’

‘Don’t you think so? I wonder. When it’s a matter of something he cares passionately about —’

They had reached the carriage and were about to climb in. A horseman who had been posting along the road towards them slowed
to pass the carriage, and then stopped with an exclamation. His hand which had gone automatically to his hat fell away with
the polite gesture uncompleted.


The women looked towards him. It was Mr Olmondroyd, owner of the mill beside which they were now standing: the high iron gates
were just a few yards further on down the street. His hand dropped from his hat to the rein to check his horse: a magnificent
animal, Sophie thought, but over curbed. It fretted against the restraint, its neck so arched that its chin was almost touching
its chest, foam spilling from its mouth over its breast and knees.


Sophie was a Morland by birth and didn’t like to see a horse so uncomfortable, but a glance at its rider’s face told her this
was not the moment to speak. Mr Olmondroyd was scowling horribly.


‘Well, ladies, so you didn’t heed my warning!’

Prudence raised an eyebrow. ‘I was unaware that you had issued one,’ she said coolly.


‘Nay, Miss Pendlebury, you can look hoity-toity from now till Easter,’ Olmondroyd said, red-faced, ‘but it doesn’t change
the fact that you’ve been interfering again where it doesn’t concern you!’


‘It concerns every Christian person who has —’

‘I warned you last time not to go meddling amongst my workers,’ he interrupted, working himself into a rage. ‘You spoil them
with your charity and your mollycoddling and make them fit for nothing. I won’t have them stirred up and made discontented,
and so I told you!’


‘Mr Olmondroyd, you have no right to tell me anything,’ Prudence said. Sophie admired the steadiness of her voice. The angrier
Olmondroyd became, the cooler she grew. ‘You have no authority over me. And as far as I am concerned, these poor creatures
I have been visiting are not your workers, but simply Christian souls who are suffering —’


‘Suffering? Suffering? I’ll give you suffering!’ Olmondroyd shouted, making his horse waltz on the spot, its ears flicking
back and forth in alarm. ‘If I was your pa I’d give you the leather as long as I could stand over you! Go and meddle with
your ma’s workers if you must poke in where you’re not wanted! By God, I think she’d give you short shrift if you did, and
never mind all this Christian nonsense! And as for you, Mrs Hobsbawn, you may tell your master I shall speak to him straight
if he doesn’t keep you in order — straight and true, I shall, and no mincing, the next time I come upon him, so now then!’


Sophie had been gently reared, without ever having been spoken to harshly in her life. The loud voice and angry words made
her tremble. She wanted most of all to run away, but while Prudence stood her ground, her lips pressed tightly together and
her eyes bright as a cat’s, Sophie must stand with her.


‘Mr Hobsbawn knows where I am and why,’ she said, and was angry with herself that her voice sounded so faint and tremulous.
‘He approves of what I do.’


‘Aye, well, he would, wouldn’t he,’ Olmondroyd retorted cruelly, ‘coming out of the gutter as he did! And with his fancy ideas he’ll be back there before you can say knife, but I’m damned if he’ll take me with him, and so you may tell him!
And now, ladies, perhaps you’ll be so good as to move this carriage out of the way of my gates so that hard-working folks may get on with
their honest business.’


The carriage was not obstructing the gates in the least, but Prudence laid a warning hand on Sophie’s arm, and urged her gently
into the coach. Olmondroyd plainly did not consider they warranted even the ordinary courtesies, so there was no knowing what
he might not say next. She climbed up after Sophie and the carriage moved off.


‘That uncouth man!’ she exclaimed as they lurched over the ruts of Water Lane. ‘He’s the worst of all of them; but if he thinks
he can stop us visiting the poor and sick — why Sophie! You aren’t crying are you?’


‘Oh, no, not really. It’s all right, I’m just being foolish. I hate unpleasantness, that’s all.’

‘You aren’t used to it,’ Prudence said. ‘Now if you’d been brought up by my mother . . .’

‘Oh Pru!’

‘Foolish, I’m teasing you! That’s better — I just wanted to make you smile. You mustn’t worry about Mr Olmondroyd. No-one
shall stop me from doing what my conscience bids, and as long as you have Jasper’s approval, you can care nothing for that
rude man.’


‘I don’t care for myself,’ Sophie said. ‘But he has influence amongst the mill masters. I’m afraid he will stand in Jasper’s
way, and prevent our scheme from getting on.’


‘He’ll try,’ said Prudence bluntly, ‘but I think your husband is a man to be reckoned with, and there are other mill masters
who will side with him against Olmondroyd.’


Sophie murmured agreement. Prudence wanted to comfort her, so she didn’t add that the very idea of there being sides and having
to be on one and against the other made her feel unhappy.


At the same time, Jasper Hobsbawn was talking to Jacob Audenshaw, another mill master, and father of five sons, four of whom
had courted Sophie during that heady Season when Jasper couldn’t pluck up his courage to speak for her. The Audenshaws were friendly, unassuming people, and Jacob not only owned a large mill but a half share in Droylsden and Audenshaw’s
Bank. He was an important man for Jasper to have on his side.


But Audenshaw was shaking his head. ‘I know, I know. You’ve said all these things to me before. It’s just the same with the
factory reform and the minimum hours: I agree with you in principle, but I just don’t see that there’s anything we can do
about it in practice.’


‘We can change things if we all act together,’ Jasper said urgently. ‘That’s the whole point —’

‘The whole point,’ Audenshaw interrupted, ‘is that we won’t all act together. Olmondroyd, for instance, will never agree to reduce hours, and there are many who look to him for their
lead. I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to go out on a limb on this particular tree. If I cut hours or increased wages, I’d have
to put my prices up, and then I’d lose my customers to the likes of Olmondroyd, who’d kept his prices down. I’ve five sons
and three daughters to find for, Hobsbawn. I can’t be throwing my business away; and I think when you’ve more than just the
one, you’ll feel the same.’


Jasper took a deep breath, and then let it out slowly. He had told Audenshaw, and the others, time and time again that experiment
had proved that cutting hours increased both the amount and the quality of work done by the hands. They simply would not believe it. They said it was impossible,
and that was that; and when he insisted otherwise they smiled politely and went away shaking their heads over him and pronouncing
him unsound. The fact was that however badly the mill masters felt about the condition of their workers — and there were many,
like Audenshaw, who were decent sorts and did worry — no-one was willing to risk being undercut by harder-hearted competitors.


He knew there was no point in pursuing that particular matter for the moment, and he was more immediately interested in his
housing scheme. So he said as calmly as he could, ‘Well, never mind the ten hours business, Audenshaw. What about this other
plan of mine?’


Audenshaw laughed and shook his head. ‘You’re a funny one, Hobsbawn, and no mistake: always riding some hobby horse or other! Now you want to build new houses for the mill hands, and you expect me to pay for it!’


‘They must live somewhere.’

‘Aye, aye, so they must. But they manage somehow as it is. It’s not my business.’ Seeing Jasper with the light of battle in
his eye, he went on hastily, ‘And in the name of reason, man, why d’you want to build in that particular place?’


‘Because that’s where the houses are needed most.’

‘Right up against the walls of Olmondroyd’s mills? It’s a red rag to a bull. He’ll never agree. Besides, there are houses
there already—’


‘Houses, you call them? Filthy, verminous, fever-haunted sties! No, worse than sties: I warrant you even Olmondroyd wouldn’t
keep pigs in conditions like that.’


‘Maybe not, but you’re picking yourself a hard row to hoe. There’s a nice empty field down at the bottom end of Deansgate
— now why don’t you build your houses there instead? You wouldn’t annoy anyone then.’


Jasper looked at him cannily. ‘Would you come in on the scheme if we built there instead of in Water Lane?’

Audenshaw looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, now, you know, this isn’t a scheme I can put to my partner with any confidence, is
it? Capital must have its return, Hobsbawn, you know that. And the rents you propose — well, a man would be foolish to invest
in your scheme for an uncertain one per cent when he might have a certain five almost anywhere, just for the asking.’


‘The return would not only be in money rents,’ Jasper said. ‘Well-housed mill hands will work better and harder. There’s the
greater part of the return on your capital! Its value would be beyond calculation —’


‘Exactly so: beyond calculation! I can’t put a scheme like that forward to our depositors, even if they are mill masters.
And as for my own money,’ he went on hastily, anticipating Jasper’s next question, ‘I can’t afford to take risks. I’ve two
daughters out, and one coming out next Season. Have you any idea of the expense involved in that?’


‘Not yet,’ Jasper smiled, giving up for the present. He knew that like water wearing away a stone, he must go on and on, but
gently and imperceptibly. ‘Fanny’s not six months old yet. That pleasure is still to come.’


Audenshaw softened. He liked Hobsbawn, liked Sophie, and thought the whole story of their courtship and marriage very touching.
He said, ‘Well, look here, Hobsbawn, if you can get some of the others to agree, and if you can get the right side of Olmondroyd,
you can come to me again, and I’ll think about it. That’s the best I can promise. But I still think you’d do better to look
at an empty site. What about over on the other side of Swan Street? There’s a nice, flat piece of land there.’


‘Thank you. I’ll think about it,’ Jasper said neutrally, and prepared to take his leave.

Audenshaw called after him. ‘If you’ll take a word of advice—’ Jasper paused enquiringly. ‘Don’t make an enemy of Isaiah Olmondroyd.
He’s a hard man, and he makes a bad enemy.’


Jasper nodded. ‘Thank you for the warning. But he may find that I’m not the man to cross either. When I care about something,
I don’t give up easily.’


The man who had been Jack Flanagan ended his life more comfortably than he had ever lived it. Cradled in his warm nest of
cotton, his head full of the fumes of raw spirit, his senses were pleasantly numbed so that he did not feel the stab of the
infection creeping up his arm towards his heart. He puffed on his clay pipe and the stolen tobacco tasted better than anything
he had ever smoked. Drowsiness came slipping over him. The Angel of Death, he thought, was hovering somewhere very near; he
could almost see the big drooping wings in the shadows on the ceiling above the cotton-bale walls of his hiding-place. He
thought he ought to say a prayer, but no words would come to him. He slid down wordless as an animal into his alcoholic stupor,
made the more profound by his long famine and weakness.


The clay pipe slipped from his fingers to the floor, rolled over once, and spilled its glowing dottle of hot tobacco against
the bottom of a cotton-bale. Almost at once a faint thread of smoke wavered upwards, and in a moment a little red-gold tongue
of flame appeared and licked greedily at the edge of the bale. The man did not stir, sunk deep in a half world between sleep and death; his own flame guttered low as the vigorous new flame he had lit jumped up the side of the cotton
and then leapt merrily across to the next oily bale, eager for adventure and excitement.


Jasper Hobsbawn had his offices in Number Two Mill, the largest of the three buildings of Hobsbawn Mills. It was the only
one which as yet worked through the night, for he had only just installed gas lighting in it. He meant to put lighting into
the older Number One Mill within the next year. Number Three he wasn’t sure about. It was a weaving shed, still one of the
few power-loom sheds in the country; but the looms themselves were old and crude and not very satisfactory. He felt they needed
new and better looms before it would be worth lighting the mill and working nights as well as days. He studied new designs
for looms whenever he could get hold of them, and as soon as they had capital enough —


But one thing at a time. The first capital expenditure must go on rational housing for the hands. As Robert Owen said, the
human machinery must be as carefully looked after as the wooden or metal. Jasper turned over the latest design for workers’
houses sent to him by John Skelwith and studied it carefully. Later this month he and Sophie would be going to York to visit
her parents, and he and Skelwith would be able to get down to some real planning. The drawing Skelwith had sent looked very
nice, very nice indeed, but there was a great deal to be considered. The dimensions, for instance . . .


The sound of some distant disturbance brought him back to the present, and he fumbled for his watch, realising that it was
dark outside, and he had sat later than he intended. He had told Sophie he would dine at the club, where he had