And why was it was that Mr. Catts and his mill-mates should insist upon this particular bench and none other? The answer was a simple one: the spot where the bench was placed commanded the best view of Mrs. Colthurst’s Fine Dress Shop, situated directly across the lane. Here the five young men partook daily of their forenoon refection (for unlike Mrs. Colthurst and her employees, who were not expected to begin work until eight o’clock, early-shift millworkers commenced their labours at half past six). Was there something architecturally interesting about the dress shop that drew the young men so close? Of course not. It was a rather drab and dingy building, only slightly redeemed by the charming colourful frocks hanging in its large street-side window. No, as the reader has, no doubt, already guessed, it was the young lasses who went thither to toil each day, and who, by fortunate coincidence, came out from it to take their bit of late-morning sun in fortuitous concurrence with the latter half of the young men’s luncheon.
However, today was different. The weeks of male gawking begetting female blushing and bashful giggling had drawn to a close. A new epoch was dawning, ushered in by none other than Mr. Tom Catts himself, whose idea it was to move matters into a brand new sphere of engagement betwixt the sexes.
Tom, though informal leader of his group, was not its oldest member. This distinction belonged to Tom’s lifelong friend Cain Pardlow, who, at three-and-twenty years of age, had watched his four companions wax from early childhood — their collective friendship cemented in the shabby and soot-begrimed side avenues of the Manchester neighbourhood of Hulme. It was from this city that the five had fled only two years earlier to seek employment in a different town — one that afforded fresh air and salubrious sunlight, at least during those hours spent away from the bronchiotoxic and Cimmerian cotton mill.
Cain was quite blind without his spectacles. He had dark brown hair and skin of perhaps a lighter tone than that of his companions, for as boilerman’s apprentice, Cain worked in the mill year-round. The other four, who were engaged as spinners and weavers, slipped away with most of the other men of the town in early summer to make hay in the neighbouring fields, as was the long tradition of this parish. (It was a tradition that would soon be coming to an end with the anticipated demise of Lord Tulle, who had always wished his many tenanted acres kept under cultivation and the parish to maintain its historical bucolic character. His heir, on the other hand, was a majority stakeholder in one of the mills, and was eager to see Tulleford join the march to rapid industrialization, which was producing smoke-belching mills and factories from the Pennines to Liverpool Bay, whilst reducing the parish’s cornfields to a state of permanent stubble. For an expenditure of only a few extra pence a week a farmhand could be enticed to abandon his plough and pitchfork and take up the operation of a mule spinner or a loom, which generated enormous profit for the mill owners.)
Cain Pardlow read. He read Lucretius and Epictetus and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and The Six Enneads of Plotinus, betwixt the alternate firings of the twin furnaces of the mill’s new Lancashire boiler. He spoke sometimes to his chums of what he had learnt from his scholastic maunderings, but found little in their responses with which to fuel the flues of enlightened discourse, and therefore he largely confined his conversations with his mill-mates to more prosaic observations. It was axiomatic that most men (and women) in the mill town of Tulleford — with the exception of fireside dips into the Holy Bible and the occasional browse of a Manchester newspaper — did not read.
Cain was born a twin, and when his brother was brought forth into the world strangled by Cain’s umbilical cord, his parents named the dead child Abel and its apparent fetal murderer the only logical companion-appellation. Though Cain was slender — almost scarecrowish in frame — yet he possessed nonetheless a gently rounded face, his cheeks deeply dimpled — the indentations becoming even more pronounced when he smiled — though this was not a common occurrence, for whilst Cain sometimes perceived the potential for levity in situations deriving from his daily intercourse, he was not inclined to acknowledge this fact upon his face, except when there should be missteps and pratfalls resulting from the impetuous blunderings of his mates. (For how could even the most inveterate stoic not laugh — or at the very least, smile—over such puerile behaviour?)
Next oldest by but a few weeks was the wittiest of the five, Jeremiah Castle. Jeremiah — familiarly called Jerry — was an orphan. He was, at a very young age, taken in by a benevolent cheesemonger and his equally benevolent wife, in whose company he grew to solid, strapping manhood (largely through the hoisting of heavy cheese wheels). Jerry was the strongest of the group, and though quick to put his opinions forward and to lose his temper with those who did not subscribe to them, yet he would never engage his fist unless it was absolutely necessary, and even then would apply it with measured restraint, lest the recipient of his displeasure incur permanent bodily injury.
Next came Tom Catts, who wore thick mustachios, in part to hide his plump, girlish lips, which were the object of ribald remarks by his companions, although he could certainly melt the heart of any member of the gentler sex who found soft blue-grey eyes, ruddy cheeks, and pouting, bristle-browed lips to be creditable aspects to the physiognomy of a young man. Unfortunately, Tom’s character was blemished by a scheming, unscrupulous nature. Intrigue was mother’s milk to him, and it pleased him to no end to get the best of others. He did not see himself dwelling forever in the company of his four mates, for there were mountains to be climbed and fortune to be chased, and most importantly, people — a good many people — to be bested.
The youngest-but-one of the group was William Holborne, called Will, whose ancestors came from someplace with fjords. He had a thick shock of straw-coloured hair, which grew even blonder in the radiant summer sun, and a baby caterpillar fixed above his upper lip, so lightly shaded as to be missed in bright illumination. He had bulging Viking arms and a buckler-like chest, and whereas Jerry was blessed with the kind of bodily strength that is marked by sinew and agility, Will’s physical prowess was muscle-bound and all but enchained, save when it should be summoned in a burst of brute force, such as upon the occasion in which one of the looms came crashing down on its operator and Will was called upon to lift it single-handedly to the plaudits of all his co-workers and to the tearful, though largely moot, gratitude of the operator’s widow (for the crush had unfortunately been too great for her frail and diminutive husband’s body to survive).
The baby boy of the bunch — a lad of a mere nineteen years of age — was given the name Patrick Harrison at birth, though he was usually called Pat — that is, when he wasn’t Runt, Scrunt, “Papist Paddy,” and “Hairless-son,” as pleased his four friends, who tolerated his tagging along with them in the beginning with only the greatest reluctance. Yet later, after he had grown out of knee-shorts, Pat’s gaping ignorance and pop-eyed ingenuousness came to be regarded as almost endearing, and so he was welcomed into the manly society of the other four without regret. Pat became the willing pupil of his four teachers, who instructed him in the arts of manhood, sometimes with secretly cruel intent, but just as often with some measure of manfully masked compassion.