Free Fludd: A Novel by Hilary Mantel

deep butterscotch, others as yellow as best butter. Their elbows jutted as they scrubbed, their jerseys rolled up beyond the joint; he saw their fine, bluish skin, the labouring swell of their slack abdomens, the tops of their heads with the fading hair.
    He pitied these women. Several of them, Father Angwin said, had lost their husbands in the Council House Riots of the previous year. The site of the riots—razed now—seemed to smoke still in the afternoon air; and where the men had fallen, each asserting his right to the fat of the land, impromptu crosses were stuck in the rubbly ground. “Either they should have built houses for all of them,” Father Angwin said, “or none at all.” Last night he had spoken of those days as his worst in Fetherhoughton: the gangs of muttering, mutinous women, handbags filled with kitchen knives and bottles of paraffin; the misspelt placards on the church door; and finally, one summer afternoon, the call to say that the constabulary had moved in, that there were casualties, that the fire brigade was on its way.
    Opposite the site of the riots stood the Methodist chapel, a lowbrowed, red-brick building; it was from within its door that the first wave of rioters had burst, with their anti-Papist battle-cries. Father Fludd accorded it a searching glance, then set out across the Methodist graveyard, where some of the Protestant fatalities had been laid to rest. He vaulted the low wall and found himself on Back Lane; he turned right, up the hill towards Netherhoughton.
    Back Lane was hardly alive to his presence; a couple of women came out and leant in their doorways, watching him with impassive faces, and one of them called out that he might come in and she
would brew tea. Remembering Father Angwin’s warning, he raised his hat to her, courteously, and showed by a gesture that he must hurry on. “Turn back,” the woman said and laughed scornfully; then went in, slamming her door.
    Soon the houses ran out; the street narrowed, became a lane. There was a good three-mile tramp, Father Angwin had told him, around the loop of unfrequented road that would take him towards the hamlet and the moors. And no shelter, not a house or a tree, simply the moors on the traveller’s right hand, and on the left unfenced fields that had once been allotments. It was the railway workers who had rented them, for here you were not far, as the crow flies, from Fetherhoughton’s small branch-line station. Besides growing vegetables, some of them had kept hens, even an occasional pig. But the coops and sties were empty now and damply rotting. The raiding parties had come down from Netherhoughton and carried off the spring greens, and at last the men had grown weary of patching and mending their fences, and replanting what was torn out. They had abandoned the site, and told their wives to frequent the Co-op greengrocers; the fields were reverting rapidly to their waste-ground character, and the only sign that the railway men had once been there was a red spotted kerchief, tied to a crumbling fence pole, and whipping defiantly in the breeze.
    Father Fludd halted and looked at the empty road before him; he felt chilled and tired. He fished in his pocket for the sketch map that Father Angwin had drawn for him, and saw that if he were to retrace his steps, down Back Lane to Upstreet, a short climb would bring him to the station yard, and from there a footpath cut straight across the fields to Netherhoughton’s main street. He squashed the map back into his pocket, and turned on his heel; as he passed the house where the woman had offered him tea, he thought he saw a curtain shift at an upper window.
    Upstreet was largely deserted now. Once you had done your shopping, he supposed, there was nothing to detain you. He looked at his watch; it was almost five o’clock, and the inhospitable chill of
an autumn evening was already in the air, a compound miasma of leaf-mould, coal fires, wet wool, cough syrup.
    As he