Jane Feather - Vixen

People continued to pour onto the field, a torrent of humanity waving banners and shouting. An air of good humor pervaded the mass, with children playing and tumbling underfoot and young couples, arms entwined, exchanging surreptitious kisses. The hustings were hung with brightly colored flags, others waved gaily from flagpoles. The crowd jostled and chanted on the field, gazing eagerly toward the platform where Orator Hunt would soon step up to speak.

Chloe sat her horse on the outskirts of the throng. She had a clear view over the crowd to the hustings and

watched as a party of men climbed onto the platform. A great roar of welcome went up from the gathering and the chant of "Votes for workers" swelled on the sultry summer breeze.

A man in an unusual white top hat stepped to the edge of the platform and the crowd roared louder. The man who'd told them about the Reform Meeting that day she and Hugo had come to Manchester had worn a white top hat, Chloe remembered. Presumably it was some kind of membership insignia.

Orator Hunt's voice rose above the crowd, which fell into a murmuring quiet. But whenever the speaker paused for effect, they roared approval and chanted his name.

Chloe's blood stirred as she strained to hear the orator over the crowd, and then she became aware of a different sound, a strange murmuring coming from one section of the meeting. She swiveled in the saddle and looked toward a church at the far side of the field.

"It must be the folks from Blackburn comin'," a burly man in a cobbler's apron declared from the ground beside her. There was a murmur of agreement as people stood on tiptoe to peer over heads to see what was causing the disturbance.

"It's soldiers," Chloe said. A troop of cavalry in blue and white uniforms trotted around the corner of a garden wall. The sun glinted on the unsheathed blades they held. Wheeling in formation, they lined up in front of a row of houses overlooking the field and facing the hustings.

A shout went up from the crowd, but it sounded perfectly good-humored to Chloe, more of a welcome than anything. And then it happened.

The cavalry, rose in their stirrups and waved their sabers over their heads. Someone shouted an order and with a cry the soldiers spurred their horses and charged

the front ranks of the throng, slashing right and left with their swords.

Chloe stared in horrified disbelief as the front ranks swayed before the cavalry charge and the air was rent with screams. Around her people were shouting, "Stand fast… stand fast." The crowd stood its ground and the soldiers fell back for a minute, unable to force their way through the compact press of humanity to reach Orator Hunt. Then they charged again, their swords chopping and hacking at the people blocking them. Chloe could see spurting blood, and the screams grew agonized, interspersed with groans and cries of terror.

"Break!" someone yelled. "They're killing them and they can't get away." And the cry was taken up. "Break… break." The crowd held still, as if drawing breath, and then with a rumbling roar surged and broke apart. It was like a tidal wave, immense and unstoppable. Maid Marion whinnied with fear as the mass of people eddied around her, and Chloe knew she would have bolted if she could have pushed through. Holding tight to the reins, desperate to prevent her from rearing and causing even more havoc to the hapless foot traffic around her, she struggled to guide the mare out of the crowd. All around, people were being trampled in the mob's terror-struck frenzy. The yeomanry charged through them wherever there was an opening, hewing at heads and hands and arms as they forced their way to the hustings and the man they'd come to arrest.

A child fell to the ground and screamed in terror as feet pounded around him. Chloe flung herself from Maid Marion, sweeping the child up. Leading the horse, she clutched the boy against her, stumbling as the mob propelled her forward.

She reached the relative safety of a garden on the outskirts of the field. Maid Marion was sweating and trembling, her eyes rolling, the whites glaring. Chloe set

the child on his feet. He stared at her for a moment in shock and then picked up his heels and ran.

Presumably he knew his way home. Chloe felt sick with a rage greater than any she had known. The mob teemed past the garden and suddenly it was quiet. The field, which ten minutes ago had been a maelstrom of humanity, was almost deserted. The hustings were a wrecked heap of broken spars, the remnants of flags fluttering on the flagstaffs, torn banners lying crumpled in the dirt. And beneath the pitiless glare of the August sun, bodies lay as they'd fallen, one on top of another, crushed and suffocated, trampled and cut. The dry grass was littered with the bright fragments of clothes, hats and bonnets, shoes, that had been ripped from bodies in the stampede.

Chloe tied the mare to the garden gate and moved out onto the field. The yeomanry had dismounted and stood around, wiping their sabers, loosening the girths of their horses. The humid air was alive with groans emerging from the mounded bodies and the whinnies of the horses as they pawed the earth and smelled blood.

Other people now appeared on the field, bending over bodies. Chloe knelt beside a young woman, bleeding from a sword cut to her breast. She was alive, though, and her eyelids fluttered. Chloe lifted the skirt of her habit and tore a strip from her petticoat, using it to staunch the blood. Two men passed by, carrying a dead man. An elderly man staggered along, leaning on the arm of a young lad. His lips were blue in his waxen face and he was wheezing painfully.

"I'll take 'er now, miss," a voice said softly. A man bent and picked up the young woman. "Thankee kindly." His eyes were blank, his voice flat.

Chloe wandered over the battlefield, helping where she could as people lifted bodies off bodies, releasing

the survivors and the wounded from the suffocating press of flesh.

They were all stunned, moving as if in a trance, saying little or nothing. Out of the sixty thousand peaceful people at St. Peter's Fields that afternoon, four hundred had been wounded and nine men and two women killed by a troop of yeomanry ordered by the city magistrates to arrest Orator Hunt.

Hugo was riding fast down Market Street in the eerily deserted city when the rumble, like low thunder, reached him from St. Peter's Fields. His horse started, lifting his head, nostrils flaring. Then the screams came and ice water ran in Hugo's veins. He turned down Cross Street, spurring his horse. People surged toward him, screaming "Cavalry" in warning and explanation as they ran.

The magistrates must have panicked, as he'd been afraid they would. But how the hell would he ever find Chloe in this mob? He rode on against the tide of humanity, searching the crowd. He turned the corner by the church, reaching the field as the last of the fleeing throng rushed past him. He sat his horse, feeling sick as he took in the carnage on the littered field. Was Chloe somewhere at the bottom of one of those misshapen mounds of tangled limbs? She was so tiny, she couldn't possibly survive such a crush.

He dismounted and tethered his horse to a post by the church. Then he walked onto the field. He saw her almost immediately, on her knees beside a prone body. She had lost her hat and her hair was escaping from its pins. It threw off the sun's radiance in a luminous glory of luster and color that was almost shocking against the grimness of the scene.

"Chloe!" He yelled her name across the space that separated them, his knees abruptly weakening with relief.

She looked up, then scrambled to her feet and ran toward him. "Oh, Hugo!" She fell into his arms, clutching him around the waist with fierce need in a gesture that flooded him with memories to stir his body and set his blood racing.

She was crying and her eyes were like drowned cornflowers.

"Are you hurt?" he demanded roughly.

She shook her head. "No… no, not really… but I'm so angry. How could they have done such a thing? What possible justification? It was the most terrible… terrible… wicked thing, Hugo." Her voice caught on a gulping sob.

"Hush." He stroked her hair and pulled out his handkerchief. "Dry your eyes… and your nose is running." He mopped the tears and wiped her nose with a briskness that concealed his emotion and enabled him to see her as he wanted to see her-a distressed child in need of comfort.

"I've lost my hat," she said with forlorn irrelevance.

"There are other hats."

"But I was most particularly fond of that one." She looked around the field and said with another cry of outrage, "Why? Why would they do such a thing?"

"Fear," he said quietly. "France has taught the power of the mob. They're terrified of a popular uprising."

"I'd guillotine the lot of them," she said fiercely. "And knit while their heads fell into the basket… except that I can't knit." Her eyes filled with tears again and abruptly she sat on the ground.

"What is it7" Alarmed, Hugo bent over her.

"I don't know," she said. "My legs are shaking. Perhaps it's because I haven't had anything to eat all day except for an apple."

Hugo lifted her to her feet, sure that rather more than her customary complaint of hunger lay behind the sudden faintness. However, satisfying such a basic need

might help to distance the afternoon's honor for her. "That's easily remedied." He took her hand. "There's nothing more you can do here."

Chloe glanced around the field. The citizens of Manchester were looking after their own, the field slowly clearing as the wounded were carried off by friends and family.

The anger still burned, but it was true she wasn't needed. Her own concerns could come to the forefront now.

"Crispin was supposed to bring a picnic… Oh, I have to tell you about Crispin." She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her free hand as Hugo led her off the field.

"I already know." He handed her back his handkerchief.

"How?" She blew her nose vigorously and offered him the crumpled ball.

"Keep it," he said. "I came across him and he was… uh, induced, shall we say, to tell me that you had left him in some haste. He affected not to know why."

"There was a post-chaise and I had the strangest feeling they were going to force-induced?" She looked up at him, momentarily diverted. "Did you hurt him?"

"Not much."

"I wish you had."

For such a healing soul and champion of the underdog, she could be remarkably ruthless, Hugo thought. "Crispin is just obeying your half brother," he told her. "like the men the other night. I've known that all along, and I don't believe in wreaking vengeance on minions."

"The men the other night'" Chloe stopped and turned to look up at him. "You mean… they wanted me, not Dante?"

Hugo's lips curved a fraction at her astonishment. "Strange as it may seem to you, lass, I believe that you're

rather more valuable a prize than that mongrel… -not that I'm casting aspersions on Dante's lineage, you understand… but…"

The teasing remark lifted the shadows somewhat on the somber countenance. "What would they want with me?"

"You're a wealthy young woman. Jasper would like to keep your fortune in the family."

"By marrying me to Crispin," she asserted. She kicked at a loose pebble, her mouth hardening. "He can't force me to marry him?"

"No, not if I have a say in the matter," Hugo agreed calmly. "But if he got his hands on you, he'd have a damn good try."

Chloe absorbed this in silence. They reached the garden where she'd left Maid Marion and she withdrew her hand from Hugo's.

"Where are you going?"

"To fetch my horse… or, rather, Jasper's horse. You didn't think I was riding Dapple, did you?"

Hugo realized he hadn't given the matter any thought. And when he saw the animal she led over, he whistled in admiration. "Beautiful lines."

"Yes, she's out of Red Queen by Sherrif… I know the stallion but not the dam. Sherrif s the pride of Jasper's stud." She stroked the mare's neck. "She's highly strung, but she seems quieter now."

Hugo frowned. "She'll have to be returned to Shipton."

"I told Crispin to tell Jasper I couldn't accept her as a gift, but I would purchase her," Chloe informed him.

"Oh, did you now?" He raised his eyebrows. It seemed an appropriate juncture to initiate the new regime and assert his seriously diminished authority with his headstrong ward. "And just who gave you permission to make such a major decision? Permit me to re-