The Baker's Tale (11 page)

Crowl gave a signal, and the bucket began an ascent toward the top of the shaft.

There was palpable relief on Edwin's face when they reached the surface.

“I like you,” Crowl said.

“The feeling is mutual. You bear your wrongs more nobly than I could bear them were they mine.”

While travelling back to London on Wednesday, Edwin considered all that he had seen. He had long been aware of suffering among the poor. But he was shaken by his ignorance regarding the mines.

The miners were slaves of a grinding iron-handed system. Day after day, they toiled underground in crowded spaces, breathing noxious air. Dark tunnels that might collapse upon them at any moment formed the narrow boundary of their existence. They worked in these wretched places. And died in them.

Edwin thought now of the children that he had seen on the streets the past few days. These children were unfamiliar with such fables as the golden innocence of youth, the prime of life, and a hale old age. They had no future other than demeaning servitude to the conditions of the day.

Alexander Murd was a man of business. He dealt in contracts, bank notes, and cheques. The coal never touched his hands. But that coal, on land that he owned, was the stuff of which a vast fortune had been made.

The miners were under Murd's control. Every legal right, power, and influence was on his side. He grew richer every day by exploiting their harsh never-ending labour.

Edwin chastised himself for his naïveté in believing in Murd and for his past ignorance regarding the mines. For much of the journey home, he wrestled with the moral implications inherent in working for Murd and also with the practical considerations relating to his well-paying employment.

He thought often of Ruby, as he had for most of the time that he had been in Lancashire.

“She came into my life like the glimpse of a better world. Saturday, when I see her again, cannot come too soon.”

The first thing that Edwin did upon arriving at his chambers in London was take a long bath to rid himself of the slimy witch ointment that the air in Lancashire had deposited upon him. The following morning, he returned to the office.

Shortly before noon, Arthur Abbott told Edwin that Mr. Murd wished to speak with him.

Murd was seated at his desk when Edwin entered his private room. An account book with numbers arranged in precisely drawn columns lay open before him.

“I trust that your visit to Lancashire was enlightening,” Murd said, looking up from the ledger.

“Yes, sir.”

“I received a report from Julian White by courier earlier this morning. Mr. White informs me that you spent a considerable amount of time in Lancashire fraternizing with the miners.”

“I spent some time with them, sir.”

“That was unnecessary to the conduct of business.”

“I did it for my own satisfaction.”

“You were sent to Lancashire to learn more about the business so that you might serve the company more effectively in the future. You were not sent to ask questions of the miners. If you have any thoughts that run contrary to this sentiment, I suggest that you leave them unsaid.”

“I understand, sir. But there is something I wish to say. It is a question, actually.”

Murd waited.

“It concerns the conditions that the miners labour under and the wages that they are paid.”

“I pay a fair day's wages for a fair day's work. I do not choose the rate. The market does.”

“But the rate is low to begin with. And the practice of cutting the workers' pay if they fail to mine a certain amount of coal each week encourages unsafe work habits.”

“The miners are not imprisoned. They are free to leave my employ at any time. A cow is worth a certain sum in the market place, and one should not pay more. A miner's labour is worth a certain sum in the marketplace, and he should be paid no more.”

Edwin could just as easily have been expressing concern for the well-being of a spider on the wall.

“And consider the times we dig for coal and find none,” Murd continued. “The miners are still paid. If we were to increase their pay as you suggest, the cost of coal and everything that it is used for would rise to the sky. Your simplicity is captivating, but I wish it were accompanied by a bit more wisdom.”

The latter words were spoken with politeness as cutting as wrath. And their message was clear. The earth had been made for Murd to trade in. Rivers had been formed for the purpose of floating his barges laden with coal. The miners were beasts of burden to be worked so much and paid so little as settled by the laws of supply and demand. Beasts that increased in number by a certain percentage each year. Beasts who were a little pinched when wheat was dear and over-ate when wheat was cheap. Murd thought no more of viewing the miners as individual men and women, each with a separate identity, than of separating the sea into its component drops.

Murd took a small knife with silver trim from his pocket and began paring his nails.

“Let me tell you a story that my father told me when I was a child,” he said to Edwin. “Twin sons were born several minutes apart to a king. The older son was destined to rule the kingdom.
The other son was relegated to a life in the shadows. Each of us has a role to play. I am not an alchemist who transforms coal into gold. How do you suppose the coal comes out of the ground? It is enterprises such as mine that cause England to be respected and powerful throughout the civilized world. Can there be harvest without seed? Heat without fire? Can anything be produced from nothing?”

“I understand, sir. But I believe that the conditions the miners labour under are unnecessarily dangerous.”

“You are an obstinate young man.”

“I prefer to think of myself as principled.”

“Are you suggesting that I am not?”

“No, sir.”

“Then find other words with which to express yourself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The dangers in the mines of which you speak stem from carelessness and drunkenness on the miners' part. In every instance where there has been a fatality in one of my mines, it was determined later by a coroner's inquest that the company followed the law. That is the heart of the matter. We follow the law. A more primitive state of society in which labour asserts itself beyond reason might suit some. But it would not be to my liking, nor would it be in the best interests of England.

“Men of business owe a duty to other men of business to stand together,” Murd continued. “Either we control the mob, or the mob will take what we have. There is nothing between fully defending our interests and throwing our fortunes away. You might make a fine politician someday with your lofty parliamentary rhetoric. But that is of no use to me in the conduct of my business.”

Murd rose from his desk with his arms folded and looked firmly into Edwin's eyes.

“You are a capable young man with a gift for relating to people. But my patience with you is being tested. There is a disrespectful manner in your words that does not become you and which you must curb. You have done a great deal to raise yourself in life. Do not spoil it. If you are ungrateful for the opportunity that I have given to you, perhaps you would prefer to work in a mine.”

Edwin spent much of the next day contemplating his future. As one goes through life, so much is dependent upon external circumstances and the will of others. But there is one aspect of life where a man has complete control, and that is his own morality.

Edwin was unsure how much longer his conscience would allow him to work for Murd. More than ever, he looked forward to seeing Ruby at the learning center on Saturday, spending all of Sunday with her, and conversing together with regard to his dilemma. The wait seemed interminable.

Edwin arrived early at the learning center on Saturday morning and looked round the room. Ruby was not there.

One of the other instructors approached him. A messenger, Edwin was told, had come to the learning center the previous Saturday and given Ruby an envelope. She had opened it and immediately left.

“She has not been here since,” the instructor said.

Edwin worried that there was illness. Perhaps Marie had taken sick. He stayed at the learning center for only a brief time, then went to Marie's bakery. I was there when he arrived.

Marie recounted for Edwin what had happened on the previous Saturday.

“Could I have been the cause?” Edwin asked.

“That is not possible,” I assured him. “I saw the way that Ruby looked at you when you were together. And she told me of her feelings for you. We thought for the briefest of moments that she might have run off with you. But she was in such torment that we knew it was not so.”

“Ruby said that her leave was voluntary,” Marie told Edwin. “But she was in such distress that I cannot believe she took this course of her own free will.”

“We have talked with the people at the learning center regarding her disappearance,” I added. “Octavius Joy has made inquiries on our behalf. All we know is that a man brought a letter to her on the day before Ruby left London. She was in distress when she returned home that afternoon. The following morning, she was picked up by a carriage. We have not seen her since.”

Marie wrung her hands. “I am tortured. Why did I not say firmly to her, ‘You have no right to these secrets. I demand that you tell me what this is about.'”

A tear, one of many shed since Ruby's departure, crept down Marie's cheek.

“It is not just one loss,” Marie said. “It is the loss of the little girl, three years old, entering upon a joyful new life. It is the loss of the child, learning to read, exploring the world that was opening up before her eyes. It is the loss of the loving spirit blossoming into womanhood, excited and in love. And worse, far worse, is not knowing what suffering Ruby is enduring now.”

Her eyes took on a haunted look. “I feel very old and alone.”

Edwin stayed with us until late that afternoon.

“I strive sometimes to disguise my feelings,” he confessed. “But I will tell you plainly that I love Ruby. It will weigh upon
me for as long as she is gone that I did not share this feeling with her.”

Before leaving, Edwin gave us his address, both at home and at work, so that we could report any news of Ruby to him.

“How soon do you think she will return?” he asked in parting.

“We do not know that she will,” I said.

CHAPTER
8

R
uby had never loved London more than when the ties that bound her to it were broken.

A man upon a field of battle might receive a mortal wound and not know how badly he has been hurt. So too, Ruby did not understand at first the full depth of the strike that had been inflicted upon her heart. That knowledge came in a procession of gloom as the shores of England disappeared from sight.

To have committed no wrong and yet to be thrust alone into an alien world, separated from those she loved, when a few days before she had been surrounded by joy, was all but impossible to bear.

She thought of Murd. Did men walking on the street shrink without knowing why when he walked beside them? If he stood above a sleeping child's bed, was the child troubled in its slumber by Murd's dark shadow?

She still did not doubt the tale that Murd and Isabella had told her. She knew now that her love for Edwin was without hope. But still she loved him.

She would have gone to the world's end to be with Edwin. Now, for Edwin's sake, she was going to the end of the world without him.

Ruby was travelling on an oak-hulled paddlewheel vessel with coal-fueled seawater boilers and secondary sail power. The sails hung from iron masts and would help keep the ship on course in rough seas.

It was not a large ship. The vessel had fifty first- and second-class cabins and three hundred passengers crammed into steerage like human freight.

The steerage area was a low dark stifling enclosure filled to overflowing. Bunks were piled one on top of another and lined the sides of the hold. Each bunk was four feet wide, made of rough boards, and the resting place for four people. The roof of the hold was less than seven feet above the floor.

The mother and two children with whom Ruby shared a bunk had lived in Sheffield. Her children were a boy of five and a girl of three.

There were English people, Irish people, Welsh people, Scottish people. All with shabby clothes and boxes containing what was left of their belongings. Men, women, and children swarmed in the dim light.

A baby fed at its mother's breast. In another part of the hold, a slattern girl of twelve seemed as much a grown woman as her own mother. A woman with an infant in her lap mended another child's clothes and quieted one more who was crawling about on the floor. An old grandmother held a sick child, rocking it to sleep in arms as thin as the child's own limbs.

Surrounded by the multitude, Ruby felt very much alone. The other passengers had left England by choice and would arrive in America with optimism and hope. Hers was a different journey.

At the end of the day, preparations for dinner began. The ship
provided each passenger with a daily ration of water. Beyond that, they were responsible for their own food.

Ruby hadn't known that.

The passengers had brought bread, cured meat, cheese, and other provisions. Fortunately, the box that Murd's man, Charles, had given to Ruby contained dried food and eating utensils.

Without that, Ruby would have been a beggar.

Then came night. Dark dismal night with no sound but the waves of the sea and, now and then, a crying child lifting up its little head to be kissed by its mother.

Ruby lay on the hard wood bunk, haunted by past hopes and remembrances. She had not known what loneliness was before. She knew it now. It swept through her like a damp winter chill. She was alone in the world with no home and no one to love her. No fairy-tale dwelling surrounded by evil spirits in the heart of a dark forest could have been lonelier than the steerage hold.

The night brought back long-forgotten memories of the hunger and pain that Ruby had endured in the cold damp winters of her early childhood. She imagined herself as she was then, clinging to Christopher's hand. She remembered how she had looked up into his loving face and how his eyes sometimes filled with tears as he gazed upon her.

She had not slept at all on her last night in London. And she had slept little on the journey to Liverpool. She fell asleep now because she was exhausted.

The great voice of the sea rumbled through her sad slumber.

By the second day at sea, Ruby was acquainted with the rules of steerage.

The area around and under each bunk was to be swept by the passengers each morning. The sweepings were then thrown in a large bag and emptied into the ocean.

No smoking of tobacco or any open flame was permitted in the steerage area.

Steerage passengers were required to be in their bunks by ten o'clock each night.

All blankets and other bedding were to be taken on deck and aired twice each week.

No clothes could be washed or hung up to dry in steerage. Every fifth day, washing above deck was permitted.

No cards, dice, or other forms of gambling were allowed.

There were two primitive toilets in the steerage area. Both were always in use with passengers waiting in line.

There was also a cow on board to provide milk for the ship's officers and passengers who were travelling in first class. It occurred to Ruby that the cow was probably receiving better treatment than the passengers in steerage.

When the weather was fair, the steerage passengers went up to the deck, where they were allowed to stand in a certain area and fill their lungs with fresh air. Ruby spent considerable time there and grew friendly with some of the seamen. They were strong men with faces burnt dark by the sun, who had toiled and wandered through all kinds of weather.

Some of the other passengers tried to lift her spirits. One, a stout man from Birmingham, had only one leg, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two. But he had brought a fiddle with him, and played it tolerably well.

A handsome lad of eighteen had an eye for Ruby. She gave him no encouragement, and he was a gentleman about it.

Not everyone was to be trusted. One of the passengers, it was whispered, was fleeing the law. People kept a close watch on the few valuables they had when he was nearby.

Each day, Ruby saw countless acts of simple kindness. There was more mutual assistance and decency in the unwholesome ark on which she was travelling than might have been found at a gathering of London society.

Faces became familiar. People smiled and talked with her. She helped care for some of the children. They took a liking to her, and she to them. The children gave her hugs and asked that she kiss them. That helped to raise her spirits.

But not enough.

The rising sun heralds a renewal of hope. But for Ruby, the sun each day revealed the vast loneliness of the sea. She would stand against the railing on the deck and gaze at the flat never-ending line of the horizon.

The ocean had looked that way a thousand years before. She thought about the great distance that she was from home, and wondered whether she would ever see London again. All the while, the waves never stopped any more than the earth stops circling round the sun.

Sometimes Ruby took
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
from her belongings, stared at the title page, and read the inscription written for her in Edwin's hand. She read the inscription again and again, feeling sadness and shame for her foolishness in imagining that Edwin might be the handsome young prince who would someday love her.

She treasured the book more dearly than the Bible.

She thought often of her walk with Edwin and the Sunday they had spent together.

There were times when Ruby feared that loneliness would overwhelm her. She dreamed often of home. The walls of the steerage hold would melt away, and things came back as they used to be.
There was a warm fireside and the little supper table. Christopher and Marie were laughing. Then the comfort of the dream would disappear in the cold hard truth of waking.

The ship's captain led a religious service each Sunday. Ruby attended, hoping for solace, but found none.

Twice, in the distance, she saw the sails of ships travelling eastward in the direction of England. Otherwise, her ship was alone on the vast ocean waters.

One of the women in steerage gave birth to a child. She lay down on her back and was attended to by two other women, one of them a midwife by trade and the other a mother with five children of her own.

Two men lifted a blanket to protect the woman's privacy.

There were periodic cries of pain.

“Push . . . Breathe . . . Push . . . Breathe . . .”

Then the cry of an infant.

Towels were doused in boiling water. The woman and her child were washed. The umbilical cord was tied with string and severed with a knife. The blanket that had shielded the woman from view was lowered to reveal an infant wrapped in a towel, lying on its mother's stomach.

“You have a son,” the father was told.

By the end of the day, the infant was feeding at his mother's breast. Two days later, the mother was up and about.

There was a death. A old man travelling in steerage with his daughter and her three young children died. One of the seamen built a coffin from crude wood planks. The ship's captain conducted a brief funeral service. Then the coffin was filled with sand. Holes were drilled in its sides, so that it would sink when thrown into the sea.

That night, there was a storm. The evening was tranquil at first, but angry clouds were gathering. The wind picked up.

The steerage passengers were instructed to lie in their bunks and hold tight to ropes tied to the wall. The entrance to the hold and all ventilation openings were closed to prevent flooding. Rain fell heavily soon after. Many of the passengers were made sick by the rolling of the sea. They vomited, and the stench of the unventilated air in the hold grew stronger.

After the storm, more than before, the passengers wished for the journey to end.

“When will we be in America?” Ruby asked one of the seamen.

“Another five days, most likely. We are going along as sensibly as any ship can.”

Several days later, a general excitement began to prevail on board. Predictions as to the precise day and even the precise hour at which the ship would reach Boston were freely made. Gamblers among the passengers placed bets on when land would be sighted. There was more crowding on deck and looking out at the horizon than there had been before.

Each morning, there was a packing up of things, which required unpacking each night. Those who had letters of introduction to deliver in America or friends to meet or any settled plans for doing anything discussed their prospects again and again.

Ruby had no idea what she would do when she arrived in Boston. She could have formed an elephant as easily as an intelligent plan for her arrival in America.

Then, on a bright sunny morning, the horizon changed. Land stretched out on either side. One great sensation pervaded the entire ship. The soil of America lay before them.

White wooden houses and wharfs appeared . . . There were noises, shouts . . . Piers crowded with uplifted faces . . . Men and boys running . . . A straining of cables . . . Disembarking . . . On dry land, terra firma.

Ruby Spriggs was in America.