A New Dark Age: A Reckoning

By Ross Patrick

When the collapsing began, in a system where scarcity was a commodity, there was always a need for the unemployed, the homeless and the hungry. When most people could no longer afford consumer goods, there were riots. The rulers called it an attack on democracy.

The riots were met with militarised, armoured police. With falling tax revenues companies took over financing the police, so the police increasingly functioned as capitalism’s own Praetorian Guard; sometimes supporting rival business leaders, sometimes bringing about their demise, and all the while living standards fell and the state started to crumble.

For Esme Sedgebrook, growing up in the provinces, there is no future other than an arranged marriage, motherhood, and domesticity, fleeing to join the uprising is as much about personal transformation as it is political.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Self Publishing Partnership
• Release date: Dec 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839523830

Book preview

I

Rain lashed the quartered panes of Esme Sedgebrook’s bedroom window. It provided a lighter counterpoint to the repeated thuds of her dad’s bed banging against the wall in the next room. Esme squeezed her eyes shut to block out the invasive images coming to mind of her dad humping his young second wife, Lizzie. At least he’ll be in a better mood tomorrow, Esme hoped.

Lizzie had been named after the old great queen apparently. Her mam must have been sentimental for a time before the fall. Esme wondered how like the old queen she felt, in the quiet, listening to Esme’s dad snoring next to her. And how like the old queen did she feel when she was cleaning out the chicken coops, gutting and feathering the birds, or cleaning out the chitlins of the pig after the butcher had been to slaughter it, or when her hands wore the stain of being dipped deep into buckets of blood to catch and remove the veins before the blood puddings could be made. And Esme stretched to think of other images of Lizzie’s not-so-regal life as the second wife of Esme’s dad to distract from the creaking bedsprings in the next room.

Lizzie arrived three years after Esme’s mam had run off to London with her lover, the bailiff. Dad said London would suit her. Esme understood the inference, because folk around the Fens didn’t like London people. ‘They ain’t like us in the city.’ Her dad said one time, when the vicar had been around. ‘They don’t look out for one another. They in’t a community.’

Canon Braithwaite, the vicar, smiled at the comment, his views communicated through slight movements of the corners of his lips. Dad said shaking Canon Braithwaite’s hand was like gripping a fish. Esme’s dad added to his comment on London folk, ‘They’re only interested in money and pleasure.’ When Canon Braithwaite was gone, Esme’s dad would repeat his view that the vicar only came by himself for silver. He made Esme sit with them and take tea; Esme suspected he did this to avoid being left on his own with Canon Braithwaite.

The vicar was important in the community; his grace and approval could bring favours and Dad said they couldn’t be too careful, what with Lizzie’s youthful misadventures still colouring the community’s view of her to some extent. Dad smiled as he said this and looked at Lizzie long enough for eye contact. Recognition demurred Lizzie’s eyes in an uncomfortable combination of guilt and gratitude. The community had viewed Esme’s dad favourably for putting his own miscreant wife’s abandonment of Esme behind him and being willing to rescue Lizzie from desperate penury or worse.

When Esme’s dad brought Lizzie home to live with them as his second wife, she brought an infant daughter with her. Tilly followed Esme around, tiny hands clutching skirts, such that Esme sometimes felt inclined to push her in one of the canals or bogs just for some peace.

When Lizzie came of age she eloped with a water-boy called Michael and the stolen petty cash from the dredging company he worked for. A year turned before Lizzie returned home penniless, with child but without Michael. A tale was told that folk chose to believe to temper disapproval, in which Michael had died protecting Lizzie and their infant child from Roamers.

Roamers were drawn from those that the Collapse had left with nothing. They drifted along by-ways between towns that had forbad them from staying. To survive they would ambush isolated travellers. They’d stalk the Great North Road, but as the more affluent brought more security, they were attacking simple folk more and more and drifting deeper into the Fens. ‘They’re never more than four or five.’ Esme’s dad boasted how he and a couple of other men had ran a group off who were harassing some unfortunately naïve travellers who’d been complacent about the quality of Fenland roads. ‘Filthy buggers in rags, they were,’ Esme’s dad said and laughed how it was ‘tough to tell which were men and which women; all hair and quick, nervy eyes.’

Esme’s father had announced his intention to take another wife to Esme one evening, with the statement, ‘It’s time,’ as though appropriate timing should be the guiding concern. ‘We didn’t have you to be our ewe baby.’ Ewe baby was what locals called young daughters who stayed with aging parents rather than married, because the daughter never grew up, always a little lamb traipsing around with her parents. It would not be Esme’s fate for she was fair of face, if a little shy, and it was assumed she’d make someone a bride.

Esme turned sixteen the previous year and was relieved to avoid what would have been her debutante season the summer that followed. ‘Another summer ripened,’ Esme heard her Aunt Jackie tell her dad, passing an eye over Esme, stood to one side feeling gormless, like a piece of livestock. Esme’s dad smiled and winked at Esme, which left her unsure whether it should be treated as a joke or whether plans might quietly be in process.

Esme heard talk of how girls that pass their eighteenth summer feel the hurry-on that each year the choice reduces, and so each year the choice becomes less your own. Esme’s Aunt Jackie said as much when she had been over last. Her eldest was only sixteen when she married, and she was with child inside a year. Then there was the mayor’s boy, a year Esme’s senior and said to have an eye for her, though they’d barely spoken. Aunt Jackie told Esme’s dad, ‘That would be a propitious union.’ Esme barely knew Tom, the mayor’s son. Sometimes she slipped into thinking these conversations weren’t about her, or not in any real sense, only for remembrance to quicken her blood. The horizons in the Fens were distant; there was no need for prison walls. She couldn’t just go to London like her mam.

The Fens stretched from Cambridge in the south ninety miles north to Lincoln, where the cathedral rises high and on clear days can be seen from thirty miles or more. The flooded marshes were sixty miles at their widest, from Peterborough in the west to the other side of Downham Market, where hills appearing as islets gradually step clear of the bogs and pull the land with them as they move east towards Norwich, on the other side of which the land once again falls away into arpeggios of East Anglian fjords and islets.

When Esme’s dad left for work, the house breathed easier. Esme heard his bicycle on the gravel yard before rising.

In the corner at the end of the upstairs corridor, suspended from a coat-hanger on the old coat stand, Esme’s wedding dress waited for her to step into like a new life measured by others to fit her.

Esme remembered Lizzie taking her to the haberdashers so that she could buy the material that she would make the dress from. It hadn’t seemed to Esme real then, watching Lizzie and the shopkeeper roll out lengths of fabric, spools of thread and boxes of pins and needles. The shopkeeper, Mrs Fitch, was a middle-aged woman with pink spectacles carried on a chain around her neck and resting on a proud bust. Mrs Fitch carried a tape measure she used to measure sections of air out between her hands. She would then draw her hands together, only to repeat the action as she talked to Lizzie. Esme had been stood to one side with Tilly, so as not to get in the way. Eventually, she had been called over to be turned around, the tape measure stretched across her shoulders, down the length of her side and around her waist. With the dress on, Esme felt like a hand wearing a shoe.

At the kitchen table, smiling, Lizzie bounced Tilly on her knee singing a nursery rhyme...

This is the way that ladies ride,

Trit trot, trit trot, trit trot.

This is the way that gentlemen ride,

Clipperty-clop, clipperty-clop, clipperty-clop

And this is the way the farmer’s boy rides,

Gallopy, gallopy, gallopy-clop

And drop down into the ditch.

She pretended to drop Tilly between her legs, only to sweep her up again, laughing. ‘The rains have broken. The weather might be good this Whitsun.’

Esme shivered in thought of the day, little more than a week hence. Her choice to not think of it had made it arrive no slower.

Esme had a journal, a notebook she kept in a box beneath her bed. Her dad didn’t know about it. She didn’t attend to it daily, but when something needed expressing. The journal listened without question or criticism. The journal alone seemed to be on her side. In it, she wrote of the forthcoming Whitsun marriage season. ‘There are kites anchored on the horizon, waiting. They are like bobbing goblins, grinning and boasting in wind-carried whispers something fearful yet tempting; an exotic pleasure only hinted at. If given lightly, its sweetness could stain.’

Esme had been reading Rosetti. Her mam had worked at the library in Fenby before it closed – when it closed, she acquired boxes of books that would otherwise have been landfill. When Mam left, her dad packed away most of Esme’s mam’s belongings. He didn’t pack the books up; they were left in the bookcase in the parlour. When her mam left, Esme decided that she would read every book and that before she reached the last her mam would have returned. It wasn’t that she believed in it but that she could distract herself with the notion. She no longer sought distraction from Mam’s abandonment of her; she now sought distraction from her own forthcoming wedding. For Esme, acceptance was supposed to be the first stage of excitement, when acquiescence was all that was really required of her. She blew out her cheeks.

Lizzie was right, the rains had broken. The kitchen’s stable-style door Lizzie had left the top half open, yawning, sucking light into the room like oxygen for lungs. Esme yawned; Tilly smiled at her. Esme was still wearing her white nightshirt but bare legged sunk her feet into her boots by the back door and stepped outside. They lived south of Fenby in an old pumping station that used to dredge the overflow water. Esme’s dad used to be a navigator, leading a group maintaining canals, brooks and lodes, pumping and draining water from fields. Later he set up as a contractor with agricultural machinery, he said the house was perfect and it was cheap because it had been left unused and unoccupied since the dredging company went bankrupt.

Esme’s mam had still been around then. Esme remembered her mam watching Esme play in the yard, or out back when her mam was working in the garden or pegging out the line. After she had gone, Esme would walk around the yard as though waiting for her mam to return. She’d gaze at the entrance, but Mam never showed. ‘You were still just a child.’ Her dad said to her. ‘It was the first time I ever saw you sad, proper sad like. It broke my heart.’ He sniffed and turned his gaze away. Esme looked where he looked but saw nothing. Maybe he looked for Mam’s return as well.

It was five years since Mam left. Esme replied to her longing, ‘I must learn to be happy living without also. After all, it is self-pity when I can see, even if there is little I wish to look upon.’

From the old pump house, Esme could see the slow-moving river, lily pads and branches of willow and sycamore decorated, drifting along by the causeway for a mile or two and leading the way to the Three Sisters Lake. The sisters in question were the sisters of Wendreda, the patron saint of Fenby whose bones and relics had only in recent times been rediscovered and reinterred in the crypt of the church that bore her name. Wendreda followed the spiritual path. Those who don’t follow the path of the three sisters, who all married kings, are encouraged, like Wendreda, to follow the spiritual path. When Esme’s severe grandmother recounted this story, Esme commented it would be hard for every girl to find a king to marry. Her grandma pinched her cheek in what Esme supposed must’ve been affection. ‘It meant marrying someone who’d treat you as a queen.’ That, though, could only be known after she married, and her fate was set.

So, it was in the Three Sisters Lake, behind the church on the edge of Fenby, where the rite of Neptune took place. She’d seen them, walking into the water in their white, cotton muslin dresses. A boy is sent in after the girl. She is to keep walking, though, without looking back, with the water rising higher around her, as if drawn down by Neptune himself to his kingdom of chasms, fathoms deep. It is bad luck for the girl to look back. The couple returns to the shore married by a priest, wading in the water, cassock soaked. He then binds the couple’s wrists with a ribbon the girl will have worn in her hair, a shawl is wrapped around their shoulders and the couple return to their families and friends to be the centre of attention and celebrated.

On the morning of Whit Monday, it was tradition for the newly consecrated young bridegrooms to hang the bedsheets of their newly deflowered brides from their matrimonial windows to prove the virtue of the girl and signify good fortune and fruitfulness for the ensuing marriage.

When Esme’s dad married Lizzie, these rituals were passed over, with it being their second marriages. Esme wondered if second marriages would be more successful than first marriages because at least there should be no delusions. Then Esme remembered the previous night’s sounds from her dad’s bedroom and wondered if Lizzie had known what she was letting herself in for.

Esme was distracted from her daydreaming by Sarah-May cycling into the yard. She part-fell, part-jumped from the bicycle she discarded, back wheel still spinning. She threw her arms around Esme, because that was the sort of person Sarah-May was, and announced, ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about and there’s not much time.’

Esme knew a ridge across part of the fen only wide enough to walk single file to a small, elevated clearing and three trees. Sarah-May followed, she spoke, and Esme listened. A murmuring of birds rose away over the fen. There may have been the shotgun crack of hunters in the far, unseen distance. ‘So, we’re leaving, Esme, next weekend, after Whitsun.’

‘What’ll happen to the cottage, the geese and everything?’ Esme asked.

‘That old Mrs Quickfall, you know, she’ll sort everything after we’re gone,’ Sarah-May replied, taking care with her footsteps along the narrow track.

Mrs Quickfall had asked Esme’s father if his daughter would visit when Esme was young, soon after her mam’s departure. Mrs Quickfall was old but dyed her hair red, sometimes there was a ring of grey visible at the roots when she was overdue a ‘touch-up’. She’d married but her husband had died young when their house burnt down. They’d had no children and Mrs Quickfall never remarried. She described herself as ‘old school’ and said she found it harder and harder to understand the way the world had become. She lived in a grand old house stood well back from the main road on the way into Fenby. Mrs Quickfall would give Esme cake, ask her about herself and read her sad stories from a large hardback book she kept in the sideboard that would cause them both to end up crying. Mrs Quickfall said, ‘The sky is so big in these parts, sometimes it seems to ache. When the sky is so big, time is slow to move. Sometimes, painfully slow.’ Esme reflected the first audience for Mrs Quickfall’s comments might’ve been Mrs Quickfall herself.

At the raised clearing, Esme and Sarah-May sat between trees with the flooded fen mere around them. ‘Why now?’ Esme asked. She knew she should’ve been pleased and excited, for she knew they had talked about moving on many times with comment the world was so much bigger than the Fens. Esme wondered if it was envy that caused her words to taste metallic and bitter in her mouth.

‘There is a meeting this week in the cellar at the Seven Stars. You mustn’t say anything as it’s a secret meeting for dissenters.’

‘Dissenters?’ Esme asked.

‘Mum says we shall meet people who can help us arrange passage. There is a march, a great rally being planned in London.’ London, Esme thought. Everyone goes to London if they can; everyone except me.

Sarah-May’s mam wasn’t like the other women. Esme was quietly in awe of Sarah-May’s mam. She was in her forties, she had dark hair with rainbows of thread twisted and twirled around loose tresses. She had a smoked laugh and a smile that suggested her thoughts were already way ahead of whatever devilry Esme may have thought of. She grew strange herbs and made curious potions and balms and some of the local people called her a witch, but when they were ill, and they couldn’t afford medicine, they’d make the journey along the narrow Fen Road, past the lavender where bees clustered in summer. Their cottage was old with small windows and a large yard wrapped around where geese wandered as security and protection for Sarah-May and her mam, squawking and shrieking if disturbed and batting their wings. Their kitchen had a well beneath the table, which Esme thought neat, as they just pulled the table aside to draw water. An old dyke had been developed into a canal that crawled along the side of the narrow track across the fen towards where a windbreak of poplars screened their cottage.

The grey sky pressed heavy and low over the shivering fen water. Esme sat and leant against a poplar tree. Sarah-May sat against a neighbouring tree. Esme gazed out over the wind-rippled sedge and the yawning, pale sky. Two teal ducks took to air and flew low over the fen, the flapping of their wings when taking flight caused ripples to hurry out behind them and across the still water. ‘You should come with us,’ Sarah-May suggested to Esme, though she didn’t look at her as she said it. Sarah-May added, as absent-minded sounding as a breeze, ‘You wouldn’t have to marry then. There’s nothing for you here, Esme. You say so yourself.’

It would only make Esme sad to wish for impossible things. Water that passes along the river doesn’t return, her dad would say, and too much water has passed now.

Esme looked out again over the sedge and reed and fen. Closer to, she saw two white butterflies rise, spinning and dancing around each other in an unravelling double-helix. However much Esme wanted a life greater than Fenby and the old pump house, this was her home. It was all she had.

II

‘We’ve been invited up to the mayor’s house,’ Esme’s dad announced at dinner, like he’d been saving it up since getting in. ‘Mayor asked me personal like.’ He sniffed; it was his poker tell that he had a hand he liked. ‘It’s a chance for you to get to know the son.’ The invitation had of course been accepted on Esme’s behalf.

Esme studied the roots in the thin gravy she was pushing around her plate. There was some meat, but when Esme’s dad noticed her ignoring it, he reached over with his fork, stabbed it, and moved it to his own plate, commenting to Lizzie, ‘If Esme don’t want it. Decent bit o’ mutton.’

‘There was a maggot in it,’ Esme said. Her dad’s eyes burnt, and she noticed his jaw tighten in clench, just for a moment, but she saw it, and he saw that Esme saw it before she returned her eyes to her plate. The mutton that wasn’t smoked or salted as macon to preserve it for the winter was kept in a cold box outside the backdoor. The mesh nailed over the hinged front was supposed to stop the blowflies and other insects getting in – it didn’t.

‘There’s note up wi’ the odd maggot, girl. It’s extra protein.’ Esme’s dad laughed without smiling. ‘Do you good.’ He then informed her they’d be going up to the mayor’s house the following evening, after which, chomping through the stewed mutton, he told them about some members of the clergy who were attacked on the Lincoln Road. ‘Most probably headed ’tween Crowland and Ramsey. Party included a couple of young novice nuns, apparently.’

‘Were they hurt bad?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Killed, half a dozen, the nuns raped first.’

‘And them brides of Christ,’ Lizzie exclaimed. ‘Mother of God! Whatever next?’ Lizzie wasn’t religious, and Esme imagined, with a contemptuous curl of her top lip, that Lizzie leapt at that expression because it conveyed an appropriate horror; how empty and ridiculous. Esme wanted to challenge her dad’s account, as she’d heard a different tale from Sarah-May.

‘Do they know who did it? Were it the Roamers again?’ Lizzie asked, still shaking her head. Esme thought it was hard to imagine Lizzie, young and in love, skipping between villages, trying to stay one step ahead of trouble with her lover, Michael. Esme imagined she might have liked Lizzie more then.

‘No, it weren’t the Roamers, it was Hereward’s people.’ Words twitched inside Esme’s mouth wanting to respond. Her dad looked between Lizzie and Esme’s faces, chewing and smacking his lips. ‘Bloody troublemakers, well I tell you: they’ll have gone too far this time.’

‘That’s not right,’ Esme said. The room paused. Even the oil lamp by the door, which hung from the ceiling with the slight sway from a draft, stilled. Esme’s knee started to jitter under the table but only the cat could see. ‘Sarah-May says those stories aren’t true.’

‘Oh, and your Sarah-May knows better, does she?’ Esme’s dad slurped his tea. ‘What about Hereward’s crossbow bolts then?’ Hereward was an outlaw who came from the Norfolk Islands, feeding the Fenland rumour mill. He led a militia, the Woke. They were said to use crossbows more than guns for their guerrilla attacks, and so when sorrowful bodies were found pricked like voodoo dolls the accompanying black magic was said to be of Hereward.

‘It wasn’t Hereward.’ Esme felt angry, far angrier than she should, for what difference did it make which of them was right? ‘Sarah-May says if it’s not the Roamers then they always blame Hereward around these parts.’ Esme’s dad snorted derision, but Esme persisted. ‘I mean, if you wanted to blame it on them, you’d use crossbows, right?’ Esme glanced in appeal at Lizzie, who shrugged.

‘I’ll tell you.’ Esme’s dad pointed his knife vaguely, gravy dripping. ‘It’ll be their fault when the state agents come to carry out the census. They’re drawing attention when folks around here just want to be left to get on with their lives. They’ll not be forgiven for bringing trouble to the Fens.’

Esme’s dad looked at her, knife and fork paused in his hands. If there was no reaction, then he would take her silence as defeat and agreement.

‘Before the census comes, they send out spies, often church people.’ Esme didn’t look up from her plate as she spoke; she wouldn’t be able to contest what he said if she looked at him. ‘There’s a preacher called Joan Ball.’

Esme’s dad studied her; the name had travelled with a cloud over it, even if Esme’s dad couldn’t prove it was from where the rain fell.

‘Sarah-May says she’s the people’s preacher. Joan Ball says some in the clergy are too impressed by princes to care as much as they should for paupers. Apparently, some act as spies and informants for the state because people trust them.’

Esme lifted her eyes and found her dad’s studying her. ‘Sarah-May says it was the spies they attacked, and she says there were no nuns raped, that was just put about to scare people.’

‘Why would they want to scare people?’ Lizzie asked.

‘Good point,’ Esme’s dad agreed, presenting Lizzie with an approving smile.

Esme withdrew her hands beneath the table, where her fingertips tapped the tops of her thighs. ‘In rural parts the church has information on virtually everyone, so Sarah-May’s mam says.’

‘Oh, it’s the mother now.’ Esme’s dad laughed, laughed at Esme, who lowered her burning face yet further.

‘Sarah-May says you know who the spies are because they’ll drift around the markets and sit quietly in the corners of pubs, listening. After a couple of weeks, they move on and soon after the agents come to carry out the census and collect their tax. They already know where to go and who’s doing what before they arrive.’

‘Rubbish!’ Esme’s dad said, laughed, shook his head and laughed again. Esme suspected that there was no conviction to his laughter and folded a smile behind her lips. ‘What rubbish,’ he repeated. ‘Whatever next? You girls do dream up some stories.’ He took a big mouthful of his stew and, still chewing added, ‘Best keep quiet with such silliness when we’re with the mayor tomorrow, hey?’

*   *   *

The mayor lived on a long tree-lined avenue in a house set back and standing over three stories. Esme wore a blue dress with a pattern of white flowers, her hair braided into a French plait. Esme’s dad had an old car he rarely used that ran on ethanol. ‘We can hardly cycle around,’ he joked. He looked Esme over and smiled.

Outside the mayor’s house, Esme lifted and dropped on the balls of her feet.

Their heavy-set housekeeper answered the door. She invited them through to the drawing room, plush with deep, patterned rugs, heavy curtains and a piano in a corner, ornaments and figurines dotted around. There were shelves of books and great, heavy dark furniture. The south-facing bay windows had their curtains fully drawn back, so sunlight flooded through in bright bands lighting whatever they struck, and if they struck nothing they would light up the air they passed through.

Esme looked into the room from behind her dad’s shoulder for a moment before she followed him in. There was Thomas Baker, the mayor, his wife, Mrs Mayor, and Thomas Junior, the son. The mayor was a large man wearing a dark formal suit. He had a big face, smiling, with an outstretched hand for Esme’s dad to shake. Esme noticed he wore a gold signet ring on his little finger. Esme had seen him before only at civic events in his mayoral robes and sash and necklace. She mentioned this to her dad on the way over; he laughed and told her it wasn’t a necklace, but he didn’t know what it was called.

‘Ah ha!’ the mayor laughed. His voice furred up with the strong accent of his less august origins; loud so even his laughter, however hearty, was intimidating. ‘Come in, come in. Greetings, Keith.’ He smiled, using Esme’s dad’s first name, and Esme’s dad beamed as he accepted the mayor’s hand. ‘And this must be young Esme.’ He didn’t shake her hand.

The mayor’s wife stood perfectly still with her hands held before her, halfway between her husband and the settee that her son stood in front of, the way someone might if told to stand. The mayor’s wife was more refined than