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acceptance of the deputa tion’s terms would amount to a compromise, and a compromise was half-way to surrender, perhaps all the way if one thought in terms of years rather than months. He could hold on, if necessary, until Christmas, and neither loss of orders nor the hint of violence that that bloodless old stick Goldthorpe had dropped when they had last met, could shake his nerve. He had studied the rules of the game of industrial bluff.
    During the ’47 riots, that had spread north from the Midlands like a heath fire, erupting in every town within a day’s ride of Manchester, he had been running a mill with less than seventy operatives, and although he kept his mill open he had GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 18
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    heard some of his own hands sounding off at street corners during the troubles.
    But in the end he had seen those same men crawl back to work after the military had reinforced the police and the yeomanry. A few factories had been gutted, a certain amount of plant damaged, and acres of local palings had been torn up and used as weapons against batons and bayonets, but within hours of the North Western Railway depositing the Guards at the Manchester terminus there had been no more talk of “Moscowing the town,” whatever that meant. He had even had the sour satisfaction of erasing the names of street orators he recognised from his tally book.
    As for the present upset, a short strike and an extended lockout, it was a personal not a national demonstration. Cromaty, McShane, and a few like them, had staked their reputations on wresting that penny-an-hour and that ten-minute breakfast break from him, and he knew what lay behind the demand. They were hoping to use these piddling concessions as a recruiting slogan for their newly formed Spinners Alliance, a David pitting himself against the Goliath of the Local Federation and in this sense, or so Sam told himself, he was fighting everyone’s battle. For if the Bible story repeated itself in Seddon Moss then God alone knew what price employers all over the country would pay in cash and lost working hours in the approaching winter.
    So the Seddon Moss deputation had trudged the dusty road to Daresbury in vain, arriving and departing empty-bellied and empty-handed. It had been a rare pleasure to watch McEwan, his Scots gardener, hosing the half-moon flowerbeds only a few yards from the front steps while the men argued and pleaded.
    He had not given them so much as a drink of water and it must have been a leather-tongued sextet that trailed back to town, for all the streams on the plain were dry and every cottage was hoarding well water.
    Meantime he had plenty to think about. Enforced idleness had given him an unlooked for opportunity to weigh every aspect of Matthew Goldthorpe’s hint of a dynastic alliance, and the prospect of having Goldthorpe’s poop of a son as the father of his grandchildren took priority over even such a matter as the shutdown of Seddon Moss Mill.
    Up here in his summerhouse, with his back to the trees, he could choose a highway for his thoughts and march along it, shoulders squared, pugnacious jaw outthrust, prominent blue eyes—“marble” eyes his rivals called them—bulging balefully at his unlikely castle that always had the power of focusing his attention, if only because it represented proof that anything was attainable providing you wanted it enough.
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    He thought first of the bloodless Goldthorpe, reputedly the richest ground landlord between Salford and Birkenhead, and then, reluct antly, of Goldthorpe’s son, Makepeace. What a damned silly name to christen a boy! What a gratuitous handicap to fasten upon a strip ling due to walk into an income of several thousand a year once they trundled the old man away. Makepeace! Who wanted peace and, if peace was thrust upon a man, who wanted the odium of bringing