New Dark Age

Ross Patrick

Description

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.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 14 décembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839523830
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

First published 2021 Copyright © Ross Patrick 2021
The right of Ross Patrick to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the copyright holder.
Published under licence by Brown Dog Books and The Self-Publishing Partnership Ltd, 10b Greenway Farm, Bath Rd, Wick, nr. Bath BS30 5RL
www.selfpublishingpartnership.co.uk

ISBN printed book: 978-1-83952-382-3 ISBN e-book: 978-1-83952-383-0
Cover design by Kevin Rylands Internal design by Andrew Easton
Printed and bound in the UK This book is printed on FSC certified paper
They hang the man and flog the woman That steal the goose from off the common But let the greater villain loose That steals the common from the goose
The law demands that we atone When we take what we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine.
1764 poem of unknown origin opposing the Enclosure Acts that took common land into private ownership. The Enclosure Acts between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, historian E.P. Thompson described as ‘a plain enough case of class robbery.’
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Epilogue
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 s