The Last Days of Newgate - Andrew Pepper [78]
Pyke smiled, pushing the dog gently towards the lad. ‘Aren’t they eating enough, then?’
‘Eh?’ The lad seemed both confused by Pyke and intimidated by the small dog.
To its credit, the dog seemed to know what was expected of it and nipped at the boy’s leg. The boy swore and said, ‘Would ye away,’ to the dog. The dog bit him harder, causing him to yowl with pain and fall to the ground clutching his ankle. Pyke heard himself say inadvertently, ‘Good dog.’ It wagged its runty tail even harder.
Pyke had been told that Belfast was a tidy, orderly town comprising stout, red-bricked edifices and broad, straight streets: a clean-living, industrious place, someone had said to him on the steamship, an Ulster-Liverpool, eminently preferable to Dublin’s effete grandeur. Another man had commented on its enviable setting: a pleasant location at the mouth of a beautiful bay ringed by soaring gorse-clad mountains. What Pyke had discovered, however, was a squalid, industrial town spoiled by unedifying warehouses and monstrous cotton and linen mills - gargantuan structures that policed the town’s skyline and belched plumes of black smoke through giant chimneys into overcast skies.
As in most industrial towns eager to show off their new-found wealth, there were a few buildings, such as the White Linen Hall on Donegall Square, which were palatable enough. There was also a smattering of attractively attired people going about their daily business. But on the whole, Pyke quickly concluded, Belfast was a drab town, inhabited by unattractive creatures, made even worse by the fact that it had been built on a bog. Accordingly, sanitation was non-existent, and at high tide the seawater rose up into the town’s sewers and overflowed into the streets, turning them into noxious rivers of waste.
London faced similar problems, of course. But London had other attractions that tempered the bleakness. Here, everything seemed different, more depressing. For one thing, it was a fervently religious town; there were more meeting houses and churches than there were public houses. For another, the guttural accents, as much Scottish as Irish, reminded Pyke that, despite the Act of Union, he was in a foreign country. The green-clad mountains that ringed the town compounded this sense of difference, and while some may have regarded them with approval, Pyke found them oppressive.
From his less than desirable lodgings, it took him only five minutes to walk to the newly constructed mill on York Street. Pyke did not have to ask for directions. All he had to do was look upwards: it was possible to see the giant, six-floor edifice from most parts of the town. From the end of the street, the mill towered above the neighbouring houses, a sheer wall of red brick soaring vertically into the gloomy sky. There was something forbidding, even monstrous, about the building. Its giant chimney stack, its depressingly uniform symmetry and its long, angular windows reminded him of a prison. This impression was augmented both by the number of cripples in the immediate vicinity of the building - mostly women whose hands and feet had been deformed by operating the new machinery - and by his first impressions of the cavernous interior. Pyke wandered through the vast chamber and inspected the hundreds of thousands of whirring wheels, all connected to a giant steam engine, and feeding an army of individual machines. Slumped over each of these was a legion of women and children, some as young as ten, red-faced and blotchy from the stifling humidity. Their dull stares told of the deadening nature of the work.
Eventually Pyke found his way to the main office, where the mill owner, John Arnold, was waiting for him. Pyke had arranged the meeting by correspondence, prior to his departure from Liverpool. In his introductory letter, he had claimed to be