The Gallows Pole
by Benjamin Myers
Imprint
Copyright © Benjamin Myers 2017
First published in 2017 by
Bluemoose Books Ltd
25 Sackville Street
Hebden Bridge
West Yorkshire
HX7 7DJ
www.bluemoosebooks.com
All rights reserved
Unauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978-1-910422-31-1
Paperback ISBN 978-1-910422-32-8
Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press
Also by Benjamin Myers
Novels
TURNING BLUE
BEASTINGS
PIG IRON
RICHARD
THE BOOK OF FUCK
Novella
SNORRI & FROSTI
Poetry
THE RAVEN OF JÓRVÍKSHIRE
HEATHCLIFF ADRIFT
The True Story
of King David Hartley
and the Cragg Vale Coiners.
For my sister Kathryn,
my brother Richard
and their families.
Ravens cawed from the rune-scored bluestones;
God’s stroffage deemed my coin debased.
The Battle Of Brunanburh: Part XX by Steve Ely, 2015.
Oh father, oh father, a little of your gold,
and likewise of your fee,
to keep my body from yonder grave,
and my neck from the gallows-tree.
‘The Maid Freed From The Gallows’ (traditional)
This novel is inspired by real people and events that took place in and around the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, England in the late 18th century.
Bean as it is the first and lassed confeshun of Daevid Hartly at the time of his capcher and inprisament he shall wryt down the thorts and werds and lyfes idears of a man what rows to greytness A man called King by them that no him and them that feer him and them folk not yet borne but who will in hunnerds of callender yers cum to no his name and say his name and raymember his name and speek his name And sing his name also and carrie it on ther lyps to tell theare suns and dorters all about the magicul tayl of the greyt King Dayvid Hartley A farther a husban a leeder a forger a moorman of the hills an a pote of werds an deeds an a prowd clipper of coynes an jenruss naybur who lorks after his own kynde an is also a lejen.
An even if theyve to fish thees werds out from up his cole ded scut still his storey will lyve on.
Part I: Spring 1767: Mennomith
Soot and ash. Snot and spume.
Quag and sump and clotted moss.
Loam.
The boy left the river and the village behind him and he felt the valley narrow and tighten as he turned up the track and the trees curled in around him and over him. Pulled him in.
In to dell and dingle. Gulch and gully. Mulch and algae. England.
Winter had just released its frosted grip on the valley and the sky was heavy with clouds that dragged themselves across it like broken animals behind him.
The scent of smoke was in the air but there was none to be seen. Only the scud and moil of the clouds and the trees closing in. The rising columns and tangled limbs of birch and beech and ash and alder.
The soil soft beneath his clogged soles.
He remembered his master Duckett’s words: keep on the river path upstream and if anyone asks you’re apprenticed to a wool comber and running errands from Sowerby. Then when you pass the black mass of trees pressed up against the sky in the distance high up to your left, and the two waters meet and there are houses and an alehouse called Barbary’s, take the packhorse brig and cross the cobbles with the death stone looming so large now it blocks the sun and casts the meeting of the two streams in shadow.
The boy had navigated the running waters at that bridge and crossed those cobbles and drawn up close to that great jagged black slab of stone lunging out from the trees to pierce the clouds, and he had seen gulls and ravens circling the distant edge of the cliff and his master had been right – it had blocked the sun – and then he had moved through shadows onto the Cragg pass where he was told it was just a short climb up the sky to where the king lived.
Hoo Hole barn on your right: keep going. There – see it. A gap and a flinty track. Take it. Watch your back. You’re on your own, boy.
As he walked he thought mainly of what he had seen at sun-rise when he had first set out with his pouch and a headful of memorised instructions: his first dead body, swinging in chains from the gibbet high up on Beacon Hill. The white morning sun was still cold as it had split through the trees and split through the chains in a glorious sky-burst that framed the form that turned and creaked in the clear air of the breaking dawn, and already the image was seared upon his memory for life.
The day was fresh but the body was not.
There it hung in a suit of iron custom-crafted to hold its crow-pecked shape for months; the sallow flesh that had long-since receded was now a sagging leathered parchment beneath clothes matted and ragged from rainfall and decay. A hanged man.
Nails – scores of nails – were driven into the gibbet post to deter people from climbing it to tamper with this grotesque suspension, as they had been known to. For these were the feckless felons that never made it to burial and their boots were there for the taking.
This man’s name the boy did not know, but he believed that the body once belonged to he who had poached and butchered a nobleman’s stag. It was said they caught him elbow-deep in steaming gizzards as he dressed it out back of his hill-top hovel, the cheeks already boiling in a pot and a haunch blackening in a makeshift smoke house.
Indeed they said it was the sweet smell of scorching meat that had given him away.
Hunger then it was that had led this poor soul to the gallows steps – a hunger for warm meat rather than cold-blooded murder. Not greed but necessity. A stag like that could see a starving family right through a season and then some. No part would be wasted, every inch smoked and seared, sliced and boiled and salted.
The execution had taken place in the dead of night after Fax folk had lined the streets in protest at the grim parade that had been promised them: the dragging of the choked body. The fixing of the chains. The second suspension of a man already dead.
Killing him once was not enough.
Valley people they were, but blood-drunk heathens they were not. They were hungry only for food, and the chains were a bad advertisement for the town.
And the smell…
Even a hundred strides from the hill this morning – even up-wind – the boy had been able to smell the diabolical perfume of the stag-stealer’s remains; the warming morning’s rays readying the corpse for hatching a forthcoming summer’s insects in the clefts and creases of socket and sore, and the retraction of skin and muscle and gums over the gaunt architecture of a desperate man already hastening the sickening sweetness of the bubble and foam and fizz of him.
He had seen that on one side the jaw had come away; what secrets this man had carried in life he kept with him now in death.
The boy had quickened his step, and he quickened it now too.
Grace Hartley was bent double, her feet shifting, as worn wooden soles chafed on worn wooden boards.
Her knees, filled with fluid, were pressed flat against the cold metal frame of the wrought bedstead as she held her
swollen stomach heavy in one curled arm and her husband put himself in and out of her. He too swollen in another way.
The only sound was the slap and creak of him.
She gripped the bed post and felt a shifting inside of her – a kicking – and she looked down at her pink ankles barely recognisable as being connected to her feet and legs as they spilled over the stiff black hide of her house clogs.
From the moor she heard the throaty alarm of a lone raven in need of a mate rising up from the lip of the sunken wooded cirque.
Grace Hartley’s husband fumbled for a full breast and weighed it; his other hand wove its way into hair that had worked its way loose from the tied rag she used to bun it, and still she cradled the swelling belly so heavy that it pulled the skin of her white back tight across the apex of her spine, and the whole parcel seemed impossibly large to ever squeeze out of her.
He pumped methodically behind her and bounced the breast and the raven called again – a distinct croak that searched the sky for one of its own, for like lustful men of the moors ravens do not like to be alone. She knew these black triangles coupled as they winnowed the air on the updraughts.
She saw a spider. Down there in the gathering dust by her foot. She saw its web too. Down there below the sad slump of the bed’s blankets. She saw a parcel of its eggs suspended, a tightly woven tear-drop shape that contained the next season’s fly catchers.
Grace Hartley awaited the final wordless thrust and then the pop and spit of his chissum and knew that any moment now in a thick voice barbed in the back of his throat her husband would say something flat about wetting the baby’s head or greasing the ginnel or doing the daily milking round. As he withdrew and reached down for his britches that were gathered around strong ankles, the floorboards creaked and the spider’s spun parcel swung pendulously with their movements – with the movements of the room – Grace Hartley held the weight of the body-within-a-body a few more seconds and felt the warm wetness already cooling as it ran and dripped, and then there was another strong kick. And she straightened.
That’s the morning milking done, he said.
Slop and spill. Smoke and singe. Sear and blister.
Smut and moss. Sky and rock.
And thunder.
Just as was told the instructions were good and the boy followed them true with his terrier in tow.
With the scent of the coming season scratching at his nostrils and souring his growling stomach, the boy entered the tunnel and let the trees pull him. The boy felt the burn in his legs and the drawstring pouch hanging heavy. The boy felt the twine digging in and rubbing a raw line across his hairless chest. Beads pearled on his brow and sweat swelled from his lip and thirst played about his throat. He thought of water. He thought of well and spigot and when he found a runnel he stopped and scooped and the dog joined him to lap at it noisily with a coarse pink tongue.
It had been a long season last. A brutal time where snow had filled the valley for weeks and only shortly shrunk back slowly up the slopes in steepening retreat. It had been a struggle to stay warm and the wood piles of most folk were down to the rotten damp stumps not yet seasoned and the still-green cuttings of autumn since. Shards of bark got the fires started and the last snapped kindle sticks blazed bright enough but gave off little heat. In the wood stores the thin rats had no hiding place.
The boy had been glad of the burner in his master’s back room; glad of the meat tea he boiled on the stove top from the guts and off-cuts, and which he seasoned with dried thyme; the fat they skimmed to spread on dried bread. Though the working days were long and he rarely saw daylight, and the blood was never washed from the creases of his palm lines and beneath his finger nails, his hands a permanent map, never had he been better fed in his short and exhausting life. Being a butcher’s boy brought benefits.
And now the first spring sun was rising though not yet warming the tight skin of the earth. Instead it only softened the frost that was hard as the gritstone bed that lay beneath it so that the boy’s boots became clogged with the black weighted mud through which the upper moorlands drained their coppery waters.
On his hip the pouch felt heavier still. The metallic rattle advertised its contents and the dog ran on up ahead, its ears pricked and soft shining black nose reading unseen signals on the softest of breezes.
As he walked the boy remembered his master’s words: never mind the sky – mind where you put your bloody feet.
The boy picked his way carefully over root and boulder. He followed a deer run through the first ragwort stalks and listened for the swish and rustle of the dog through the undergrowth. He felt the trees loom and tower and watched as the dog disappeared. Heard it barking in full throat.
And then it was as if the sky tore an inch or two like a stretch of cloth as something streaked above him. It sounded like an intake of breath, a flat throttled whistle just above his head followed by a distant clatter behind him. The sound of stone hitting wood, then stone on dirt.
He stopped and spun to follow the sound. There was nothing. He whistled for the dog but instead of returning to him he heard it bark again, further in the distance, a coarse and urgent echo up through the trees. The boy recognised that tone. It was an alarm call. His finger tips touched the pouch that hung on his hip and felt its contents there, then he followed the sound.
The dog appeared, backwards-stalking, barking and baying as a figure stepped out from the thicket before them.
You best call that bag of fleas back before I put a river stone in its eye.
The figure from the thicket was that of a boy. Older and bigger than him. He had in his hand a slingshot that he raised over one shoulder. His words were spoken in a newly-broken voice that was deep and coarse but with a wavering tone that suggested uncertainty too.
The boy whistled and then whistled again and then a third time he whistled before the dog heeded his recall. It stood in the space between them and barked once and when the boy said get by it pressed itself flat to the ground, but kept its eyes fixed on this stranger.
He saw that the boy with the slingshot had a haunted angular face and shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow to show the tightly coiled cords of his arms. There was a layer of soft hair on his lip.
If that mutt so much as flinches I’ll kick him from here to Halifax.
His voice cracked again as he spoke and the younger boy thought of the winter geese that landed down at Brearley river bank, and how his honk made him sound less threatening than he surely intended.
And where is that you reckon on going, said the older boy.
He kept quiet.
If you don’t answer you get to go nowhere, the older boy continued. This here’s my wood. Bell Hole belongs to me. No strangers pass without my word.
The younger boy squatted and scratched the dog behind its ears and said shhh in a gentle voice and then he stood and nodded up the hill.
Reckoned on going up there up top.
There’s nothing for you up there up top but sky and you don’t look like no bird to me.
Just after having a wander is all I am doing, said the younger boy.
He felt the string pulling across his chest tighter still, the pouch heavier than ever on his thin bruised hip. The older boy stepped forward. He took a step towards the dog. The dog growled. Its top lip curled back and the dog’s gums were blue, his cavernous mouth a beautiful dark marbling of pink and black. Pointed terrier teeth like ivory pins sat evenly spaced and deep set, flanked by two curved incisors that were ready to tear and tatter.
Then you can just turn back around and wander yourself back down yonder to the hole you came from.
The young boy squatted again and patted the dog and said get by and then he said get by again and then he said: I didn’t come from no hole because I’m not a bleeding animal.
The bigger boy straightened and stiffened. Made himself big and then b
igger still.
If you leave now it might be that I’ll not pretend you’re a squirrel ready for skinning and it might be that I’ll let you be. But any more lip like that and it’s not the crack of this slingshot pebble that you’ll feel but a fist curling your teeth and these clogs kicking your tallywags up into your mouth to meet them.
Can’t, said the boy. I can’t do that.
Maybe you’re not hearing me, said the older of the pair.
I can’t leave now.
Then your lugs must be clogged with summat rotten because I’ll not warn you again.
I’ve a message to run.
What message?
I’ve a man to see.
What man?
A man up top.
There’s no men up top that you could see, said the older boy. These here woods run up to the moors and on the edge of those moors there are a handful of houses and in these houses are men you don’t want to meet because these men live by their old ways and by their own rules, and they don’t want no tyke stirring his snot nose in their business. There’s secrets in these woods and there’s secrets up top on them moors and there’s secrets in the hearts of men and secrets they’ll stay because past the houses and past the moors there’s just the sky and that’s only there because the sky can keep a secret and because the men have bade it so. Men like my father.
Who is your father?
None of your beeswax is my father. Give me your name first.
The younger boy shrugged.
Jack Bentley is my name, he said.
I don’t know it.
Don’t expect you would. What’s your name?
The older boy ignored his question and answered with one of his own.
What’s this message?
That’s a secret like your name is a secret.
I swear I’ll bloody throttle you.
The bigger boy lunged at him and the dog growled and coiled itself but the younger boy stepped back and said – Hartley. It’s Hartley that I come to see. The one they call the king.
The bigger boy paused and Jack Bentley drew the dog back and the bigger boy spoke – Hartley? I don’t know no Hartley – but there was a flicker of recognition in his eye as he said this and Jack Bentley saw this and the bigger boy saw that he had seen it too. A silent moment passed until the trance of the unmoving woodland was broken by the ruffled racket of a bird taking flight like a flung book.
The Gallows Pole Page 1