Page 59
“You are from Blackthorn,” announced the oldest.
Baines looked down at himself. “Good God. Is it contagious?”
The man beside him laughed. “We can always tell.”
“How?”
“You still look well fed.”
That earned a roar from the table, and Baines pulled out the vacant chair. “A devastating blow, but a deserved one. Baines.”
“Harland.” The older man offered his hand. “That’s Carter, and the miserable fellow pretending not to listen is Ballard.”
“I am listening,” Ballard objected. “I did nay see the need to encourage him.”
“A principle I recommend,” Baines said. “My friends have been attempting to discourage me for years, but their methods lack conviction.”
Within ten minutes he had bought no one a drink, asked no useful question, and learnt considerably more than he might have done by attempting either. Harland traded wool, Carter farmed land west of the village, and Ballard had a sister whose husband had lately found two days’ work after several weeks without any.
“Does anyone at Blackthorn come down here?” Baines asked eventually, after Carter had informed him that Cranford still owed a local breeder enough money to purchase a small cottage.
“Not the grand ones,” Harland said. “Mr. Pembroke does sometimes.”
Baines lifted his tankard. “Pembroke voluntarily enters a public house?”
“He talks politics too.”
“Ah. That sounds more like him.”
Ballard pushed a folded newspaper across the table. “You want politics, there’s enough of it there to spoil your ale. There be not many round here as can read it.”
Baines accepted it chiefly because refusing would appear curious. The sheet was cheaply printed and already several days old, one of the northern political circulars which passed between Newcastle, Edinburgh and the manufacturing towns with remarkable efficiency. He skimmed the first column whilst Harland and Carter resumed an argument concerning whether a gelding with one white foot could ever be trusted.
Then his attention was caught.
NO MORE PIECEMEAL ARRESTS!
Baines stopped reading.
Beneath the heading, the writer declared that nervous magistrates, having learnt from recent disturbances, intended to abandon the practice of arresting suspected leaders individually. At the next sign of organized resistance, the authorities would allow the principal men to assemble before taking them together, thereby preventing warning from spreading through the radical organizations.
He read the paragraph twice.
The information itself was troubling enough, but the phrasing beneath it was worse.
Take the lot of them in a single night.
Baines knew those words.
Sir George had used almost precisely the same expression at Blackthorn, during a dinner at which half the table had been drinking too much wine and the other half trying not to listen to him.
Harland noticed his silence. “Found something you don’t like?”
Baines folded the paper casually. “I rarely find anything I like in print. It is one reason I prefer conversation; at least people may be interrupted.”
Carter laughed. “That bit about the arrests has everyone talking.”
“I imagine it would.”
