by Jan Needle
Will nodded gravely.
“You may trust in me,” he said, “if nothing else, to do nothing underhand. In both of us. You have my word.”
Sam nodded, and threw a glance at Sally, who ignored it. Shortly, they were trotting back to Havant.
*
Mary was not the leader, they found out, although she was deep inside the counsels of the band. Next day they met Kate’s husband Isa Bar-tram, who was no man’s second fiddle, nor woman’s either. In the village there were three men they were introduced to — they knew them by their first names only, Bob, George and Joe — and also John Hardman, the nearest neighbour, who was a thin, intense young man with burning eyes and an air of impatience bordering on violent. At first he seemed the most against them, more deep in his suspicion even than Isa Bartram, but in a day or so he formed a strange alliance with Sam Holt, they shared a boldness and outspokenness that set them quite apart, and they often huddled off together, and swore and laughed in a dialogue of their own. Sam told him he should go for a Navy officer (Sam revealed to Will one night, in their lodging) and Hardman, far from thinking it a jest or kind of insult, became thoughtful. The outlaw life and fishing, he allowed, had some attraction, but he was a man who loved his country, and would like to fight the French, not trade with them. There were, he added darkly, many of his fellow countrymen who filled his heart with shame, and not just common men like him. Sam said he liked him and (more mysterious but he would not expand on it) that he had high hopes.
Their simple hopes, though, that the men would take their cue in trust from Mary and the other women and quickly give them information about Charles Yorke, dwindled as the talks went forward. Bartram said several times that he was pleased to trust their story in as far as it went, that their purpose was discovery of information which would not lead to general wreaking of revenge against the local free trade, however innocent they were of blacker crimes. But Yorke and Warren had not been just Customs men, there was more to them than met the eye and everybody knew it. If they had died, why was that abnormal anyway? These things happened. So what next?
This struck Will as sophistry, but he could not clearly see the way to beat it.
“But Mary said — ” He nearly choked on his frustration. “It was a dreadful case, sir! She said inhuman, horrible, that — ”
Bartram interrupted.
“And Mary had no right! We tell you things, you go away, what happens next? More spies, with harsher purpose? We are known as traders, naturally we are, but unless we’re caught red-handed, the Customs cannot act against us. Will this be seen as evidence, if it carries on? Will this lead to destruction of our band?”
“But Mary says that it was not your band!” Sam shouted, and Isa slammed his hand to the table, hard.
“It is enough! No more! There are things here that we cannot say! Go now, this meeting’s over. Now go away.”
“Isa!” snapped John Hardman. “Why can’t we tell these men? Why can’t — ”
Isa stood up, a big man, face dark with anger, and his chair went down with a crash. Upstairs a baby cried, and Mary also stood, quelling them with her calm. Later that evening, at the inn, Sam suggested using money, but Will was horrified and told him he was mad. Money was not the problem, he insisted, money would insult them, money was not their need. It was trust they had to reach for from the traders, and they were on their way. What’s more, when they had left the house, Mary had smiled at him, and he thought a change was coming, if they were only patient. Samuel, who was drinking brandy to ease his bitterness, was inclined to laugh.
Next day though, it turned out Will was right. They went to Lang-stone in the morning, to be confronted by an empty beach — no boats, no men, no women working either, except for Widow Hardman. She greeted them perfunctorily, and said the men were fishing and the wives and young had walked along the shore to Warblington or Emsworth. Sam’s bitterness, not helped perhaps by a brandy headache, increased, until shortly Will found himself alone. The day was fair, so he mooched about along the foreshore for a while, then took a glass of ale and bread and cheese in the Royal Oak. In early afternoon he saw Mary and Kate, with children, coming back along the shore and went to meet them. Kate took off the little ones, while he and Mary sat to watch the water creeping up to meet across, then drown, the Hayling Island causeway.
“We have been to Emsworth,” she said, when they had sat awhile. “Seeing Sally off on to a coach. Where is your friend today?”
Will shrugged.
“We’ve fallen out a little. He has a head from drinking. Where has she gone?”
“Oh, east some way. On her usual business. Drinking, you say? Does he do a lot of that?”
Will would rather have asked what Sally’s normal business was, but he had a strong idea she would not answer. She was tense, as if anticipating.
“No, not a lot, we are not the usual Navy soaks. It is Isa Bartram, if I might be frank. Sam felt we were going to be told something we really need to hear, and then Isa… well, you were there.”
She nodded.
“Sam does not fully understand our difficulties,” she said. She paused, as if assessing. “May be that you don’t neither, but I think you do. You do believe me, don’t you, Mr Bentley? That the men round here were not a part of it?”
“Oh yes,” said Will. “Oh yes. But we have problems of our own. There is poor Sir Arthur. Sam is beholden to him in the most basic way. It is very hard for him. Not to know.”
There was a long pause. Tentatively, a mule was stepping through the watersplash, lifting its front feet high. The woman on it appeared indifferent whether they would get across, be drowned, or no.
“He is dead,” said Mary. Her voice was low. “Charles Yorke. I am sorry to be the bearer of the news, but we decided we should tell you. He was taken with his companion, the same night, and both were killed, although there is some doubt in Charles Yorke’s case as to if it was… intended. It was many, many days ago. I’m sorry.”
The mule was in the middle of the causeway, the water flowing just beneath its belly. The rider, still indifferent, had lifted her feet clear rather delicately.
“Who?” asked William. “Are you permitted? Why?”
“It was… no, not an accident, but… it was unforeseen. They ran into a band of out-of-towners, some hired men who had, well been too free with broaching half-casks, who did not know the… I cannot say rules, but I reckon you take my meaning. It was not done the way our people would have done it. Or any people hereabout that I have ever heard of. It was the act of beasts. These things happen, these… killings, on both sides. Last year we had two fine men… and one riding officer, fine too, I suppose, to his wife and family.”
“But do you know the men?” said Will. “The perpetrators? I suppose you cannot tell me that.”
Her face was sad.
“You will never find that out round here,” she said. “Your colleagues — no, the Customs men, from Dorset, Hampshire, West Sussex, London, they have done everything, searched everywhere, but they will never find that out. Nor where his body lies buried, neither.”
“Buried? What, is he in a grave? The other man, Charles Warren, was he ‘buried,’ too? They found him in a haystack, burned and desecrated. Do they call that ‘buried,’ these beastly rogues?”
There was a small silence. Her face was stricken.
“Buried, that is our understanding,” Mary said. “We do not know where, we were not told. The men who did it are a desperate crew, the rumour is that they did grievous wrong. But he is… you may tell Sir Arthur, he is buried. That must be enough. You, Sir Arthur, nobody… you will never see him more.”
But that night, by half a moon through broken clouds, in a depression called the Devil’s Punchbowl, Will Bentley looked upon the sad remains of poor Charles Yorke, and wept.
TWENTY-THREE
The body, which was like no other Will had ever seen, was still half covered when Samuel brought him to it, which he found an everlasting
mercy. He had been warned, as they got nearer, that it would be a sight he would find horrifying, but to steel himself. When Sam had come on it earlier that afternoon, he said, there had been too much light for necessary avoidance. John Hardman, who had brought him there, had told him some of what had happened, and suggested he should keep his distance and make do with hearsay. That, said Samuel drily, had been impossible. Hardman had started moving rocks at the entrance to a kind of cave, and Sam, impatiently, had had to help. From four feet or so, he had seen the awful sight.
“They had buried him alive,” he said simply. “They gave him bread and water — blind stupidity, or cruelty, even good intentions, John Hardman did not know. However many days it took to die, Yorke spent clawing at rocks too big for one man to move. His head is squeezed between two stones, and… oh Christ, Will. How shall we tell Sir A of this?”
In the darkness, with a soughing wind, there was a stench that came and went, and mingled with the sweet scent of the Punchbowl. William knew the place, not many miles from home, and had wandered there on horse and foot. A fine place to be buried, but not like this.
“Hardman,” he said. “And… and did he take the money that you offered? Christ, that is horrible.”
“Yes. I thought he would, Will. I thought he was our man, I observed him yesterday, when that big bugger Bartram was obstructing us. Don’t blame him too hard. He wants to get away from this, I think he’s had enough. He is thinking, seriously, he is hoping, to buy himself into a safer trade, less horrible, that Navy talk I told you of is not a joke. But he has friends and obligations. To leave would not be easy. And not safe.”
Will tried to think that through, but his craw was full of bitterness and hatred. So Sam had gone to Hardman and made a bribe, and the bait had been snapped up. A shaft of moonlight shone down into the tunnel that they stood over, and before he could avert his gaze he saw a face, a skull half stripped of flesh, at least one eye pecked or rotted out. God, no excuse. The devil, no excuse!
“He was not part of it himself,” said Sam, carefully. “You might not believe that, but I do. The local crew, John’s crew, were… well, there is something going on that I can’t get out of him, could not get out of him for any money. This murder, and that of Warren, was the work of some other men, some men from farther east, I think. Some Hampshire men took part in it in some way, but not John Hardman nor, I guess, any of the ones we’ve spoke to. But a friend of his, maybe. Yes, a friend of John’s did, which is how he could take me to the grave. This lad showed it to him and now he’s gone, John says. He says he fears he’s killed himself. Aye, I see your face, Will. ’Tis hard to swallow, I ain’t sure myself. I’m pretty sure John is, though. I think he’s had enough of it, and that is why he told me.”
“Aye!” said Will, with passion. “And you paid him for the telling! Oh hell, Sam, hell! Poor Yorke is lying there! Mary said it was the work of beasts, but they are part of it! All of them. And Jesse Broad was, too!”
He stood there, panting and in sudden tears, and Sam was silent for a while.
“We ought to bury him, whatever,” he said at last. “I asked John why they’d done this to him, and why they’d stuffed Warren into a burning rick as if a decent Christian burial was a thing they could not have, but got no answer I’d call sensible or straight. He said it was not the normal way, that nothing like this had ever been done that he knew of, that there was food and drink, he was not meant to die. Will, I believed him. Except it did not seem like all the truth. He took the money, true, but he was sweating on it, as if ashamed almost to death. I truly do not think we’ll see him anymore, nor will his companions. Maybe they are evil, and not him. Will, he tried to tell the truth, I do believe that.”
“But surely Mary — ”
The cry, half a question half a statement, crumbled in his mouth and turned to ash. Out-of-towners, she had said, and called Yorke “buried,” but surely she must have known? He agreed with Sam on this point, that Mary Broad was a high officer in the Langstone crew, if not their leader-captain. Surely she must have known as much as the Widow Hardman’s son?
“What did she tell you?” said Sam, his voice low. “That Sally is not a Guernsey maid but French? That her real name is Céline, and she smuggles prisoners? Did Mary tell you that?”
“Prisoners? What do you mean?”
“French prisoners of war,” said Sam. “They have a net, to get them off the hulks in the Medway and the Thames. They closet them in farms in Kent, then ship ’em out in bulk. John says the signs are there’s a shipment soon. Soon now, Céline will disappear. She does it regular. Now — is that what Mary told you, honest Mary?”
But honest Mary had told him Sally was gone east, just that very morning. “On her usual business.” A breath arose from the grave-hole, vileness mixed with a zephyr of the autumn, and Will gagged. Had Mary lied? Had Hardman? The body down beneath them was all that they’d discovered that was concrete and visible. The body crying out for decent Christian rest.
“Sam,” he said. “We cannot bury him. Sir A would not forgive that. What, just cover him with stones? Leave him unmarked and unspoken over? Sir Arthur, when he knew, would — ”
“He must not know!” Sam interrupted. “God, know what? Should we tell him this? This man was his flesh and kin! What, tell him they walled him up and let him starve to death?”
For some long time they neither of them spoke. The breeze was gentle, blowing now a sweet breath, now a foul. Sam put his hand on Will’s upper arm and squeezed it.
“We cannot bury him, you’re right,” he said. “How can we tell him in a way that he can bear, though? He will bring the body home to Langham, or maybe do a service here. No, he will take him home to rest. There is a chapel in the grounds. A memorial to his wife and children. He would have had the boys back from Batavia if he could have done. Let’s cover him against the beasts, though. Would that there had been some way to protect him from the human beasts.”
As they toiled, piling stones on stones, Sam mused aloud on why it should have happened, and if this was the end. It seemed to both of them the murderers had wanted it a deadly secret — unless it could be true they’d meant to save him at a later time, which they deemed a fairy story — so who knew what they might not do when the tale was out? But they could see no actual reason why Yorke’s resting place should draw them anymore, or why it should be desecrated before Sir A had chance to send a party. As their final act, they made a cairn of stone, and blazed every third tree on a direct way to the road. With instruction, other men could find it now.
The journey back was long and arduous, taking them the most part of the night. Although it was not cold there were rain flurries, and the road was difficult with mud in places, which all cut down the opportunity for talk or tracking side by side. This suited both of them, as each had hard and lonely thoughts to ponder on about their expedition, and what they’d found. Will did have thoughts of Deb as they got nearer, but he found it easy to dismiss them, or push them sideways with thoughts of other things. Other women indeed, for Mary and Sally (or Céline) kept buzzing round and round his head like rats in a wire trap. Deb might betray him with Wimbarton (the mad thoughts went), or he might betray her by denying what he felt was love, but Jesse’s widow had betrayed him already with her lies, and Sally might be a spy. This was grist to wrestle with, and then he’d realise that as he rode along towards the Lodge, he saw Deb lying there in front of him, naked and with arms stretched wide in welcome, and he would be ashamed.
Dawn was breaking, fair and mild, when the gatehouse hove into view, and both their minds were full only of the buried man and how they would tell it to his uncle. This time there were no guards in the building, which was shuttered, so they trotted up to the house wondering if they should drift in quietly to the stable yard and find some straw to sleep on. But dogs barked, as they were bred to do, and quickly an ostler with a musket stepped through a door to check them. Within five minutes Tony joined them, to tell them his orders we
re to wake Sir A whatever hour they returned. He took them to the parlour straight away, where there was food and beer laid out in case, and the thick embers still gave out unneeded heat. It occurred to both of them that the poor old man’s anticipation was a constant state, and he had geared his house to their return. In the short time that they waited they were tongue-tied and hopeless, with a picture built in both their minds of tragedy.
Sir Arthur Fisher entered silently, and for a long moment all three of them kept the silence up. At first it was appropriate, because whatever news they had, the situation was solemn, but rapidly it became an embarrassment, a pain. Will saw hope in the old man’s face, hope fighting with despair. After some seconds he felt a wild desire to scream out, “It’s all right, your nephew’s found!”, and the madness of it gave him a stabbing in his stomach. Sam raised both arms as if he also could not speak, and Sir A’s face was like a landscape in a summer gale, with clouds and sunshine racing over it. Finally, a tortured release, Sam let out a groan. A noise followed from Sir Arthur like a sob, and the two moved together into each other’s arms, their faces buried in each other’s shoulders. Will turned away his eyes.
When Sir A drew back, his face was stricken but controlled. He nodded formally to Will, he pushed Sam gently towards a chair, and turned his back on them and stared into the dying fireglow.
“Tell me,” he said. “You’ve found his body, have you not? Tell me where, and how he died.”
It was swiftly, simply told by Samuel, who included Will and praised his knowledge and his history as the keys to their success. He started at the beginning, when they’d ridden off from Langham Lodge, and he emphasised the civility and humanity of the smugglers they had met. These, he told Sir Arthur, had blamed it on a lawless gang — lawless by the terms of the fraternity — probably young, probably drunk, who had behaved in a way none of their fellows would descend to, and whose bestial behaviour had put them “in free trade terms, beyond the Pale.” Charles Yorke, he said, had been buried, roughly and without compunction of observance, in a country place that had been discovered to them by a young man “eaten up by shame.” At the end of that, he faltered to a halt. In the rising light blazing through the enormous windows, Sir A, unblinkingly, studied him.