Pam Rosenthal - The Slightest Provocation

She licked her lips, which weren’t as full as they once had been, but which still had a sinuous curve to them when she smiled. She nestled back among the swans-down pillows and let the shawl fall away from her.

He’d be leaving in an hour, as he always did. While Kit and Mary would be waking tomorrow, smiling into each other’s eyes and still in each other’s arms when the busy sun stole through the windows.

Doesn’t one always wish one’s children to have more than one’s self has had?

And anyway, what she’d had-what she still had-was good enough.

She stared across the room to meet his contained, confident gaze. Same way he’d looked at her from the first, when she’d been told to oversee his work on the old paneling, on her way to learning to be a great lady. But now she knew how to return his look-and to value it and everything good she’d gotten from her life and had still to look forward to.

And no, it wasn’t really very late. The sun’s rays hadn’t stretched over the hills yet.

She laughed again.

“Come back to bed, Martin,” she said. “There’s still time.”

As far as I know, there was never a village of Grefford in the southeast corner of Derbyshire. But there was and is a town called Pentrich, and on the night of June 9, 1817, a few hundred men did set out in the rain for Nottingham, hoping to continue on to London. A farm servant was shot accidentally; it was the only blood spilled that night. Those of the marchers who got to Nottingham were met by a waiting detachment of cavalry; those who weren’t arrested immediately were hunted down in the next few days. Three men were convicted of treason and hanged; fourteen others (knitters, miners, masons, clerks) were transported for life to the brutal penal camps of Botany Bay.

And there was an agent named Oliver (or Hollis, or Richards, or perhaps his real name was something else entirely), in the employ of the Home Office, who presented himself to reformers in the countryside as a delegate from the London leadership, and who urged them toward insurrection. At the British National Archives, you can read a microfiche copy of his reports to Lord Sidmouth, as well as the reports of local informers and Sidmouth’s correspondence with the local magistrates.

As the date of the planned insurrections approached, reformers in the countryside grew increasingly suspicious of Oliver; unfortunately no one from Pentrich was present at the Nottingham meeting where these suspicions were aired. Oliver was finally exposed by a Mr. Dickenson, who knew something was wrong (as one would in that society) upon seeing General Byng’s servant doff his hat to a man of the lower orders.

Dickenson broke the story to the Leeds Mercury. And even as the leaders of the Pentrich rising were tried and convicted of treason, the story of “Oliver the Spy” became a lightning rod for public sentiment against domestic espionage, and helped contribute to the passage of the First Reform Act of 1832, which extended suffrage (though not awfully far) among the men of Britain. As for Oliver, he was spirited away to the Cape Colony in South Africa, where he was given yet another name and an undemanding job with the British East India Company, and where he died several decades later.

While in the village of Youlgreave, a bit to the north and west of Pentrich, there’s a cistern, built in 1829 to bring piped water from the local spring, and established through the efforts of the Youlgreave Friendly Society Women.

I wanted to locate Mary and Kit’s love story in this world of change and conflict, dark intrigue and incipient popular progress. And I wanted as well to situate them among characters (like Peggy) with love stories of their own. I like to imagine my romantic hero and heroine as one pair among many, their joys and sorrows amplified and reflected among a variegated and brightly hued populace, as though in a country dance.

But there’s a pair of actual historical lovers I didn’t bring into these pages, for they were too humble to know anyone like Mary or Kit and too desperately poor to afford tickets to a country assembly. Jeremiah Brandreth led the Pentrich marchers, fired the shot that killed the farm servant, and was hanged the following November. His wife, Ann, walked from Sutton-in-Ashfield (near Nottingham) to Derby to bid him farewell. In his last letter to her, he wrote:

I feel no fear in passing through the shadow of death to eternal life; so I hope you will make the promise of God as I have, to your own soul, as we may meet in Heaven… My beloved… this is the account of what I send to you-one work bag, two balls of worsted and one of cotton, and a handkerchief, an old pair of stockings and a shirt, and the letter I received from my beloved sister…