Listen to what I tell you now: no man but your master must ever know you’ve been here because if they do I’ll put you in the soil while you’re still breathing and they say that to drown in the red dirt of Erringden moor is worse than drowning in the flood waters of the Calder. It fills your mouth and pulls you under and strips the meat from your bones until there’s nothing left but the last lonely cry of the boy with the big mouth that they called Jack O’Matts Bentley.
He leaned back again and then added: and it’d not be the first time.
Behind him Grace appeared with a board on which there was cheese and bread and a jug.
The boy chewed at his lip and then in a voice higher than he intended he said:
Will you teach us to clip?
Grace laid the board on the table.
No, said Hartley. I will not.
I’m a good learner, but.
No.
They say there’s good money in the yellow trade.
And there’s good money in meat too, said David Hartley. Stick to what buggerlugs is learning you and you might just avoid the gibbet.
The boy lowered his voice and said but no man ever got wealthy off blood and offal.
Hartley looked at his wife and then back to the boy. He raised an eyebrow. He shook his head.
No, but he never got his neck snapped neither. Now fetch us that dog you’re giving us.
Part II: Summer 1768: Buzzems
In the fyres of the forges in the Black Cuntry was where I first herd tell of coinin where I learnit a little about chippin and clippin swimmers where I learnit about the yeller trade and the work of them men that darest to.
It was down neer the citty they name Burningham for reasons that shud be clear that I was apprentissed to the smithy The smithy made anything A big place it was hot and noisy and deirty like nowt yood ever seen or herd or smelled and when the men there got to torkin it was a revvalayshin to me they mite as well have been speeking in tungs the way the werds come out But thats by the by what matters is what they done and what they done is smelt and pour and hammer and mould What they done is hoist and heft and scald and steam And what they done was learn us a new trayde a new way. A way that I brung back up to the hills to tell to my kith and kin so that we can all get back at the man and maybe live more freely and comfurtable on this littul shive of tough hevven This littul patch of land I calls a kyngdum.
I’m torken about the fine art of the coinin and the clippen Makine munny and fucken the man.
Made all sorts did that forge Made nails railins locks buckels wether vaynes made ever thing from bayonetts to chatterlains Made ackses all sorts of ackses Made beard ackses bordin ackses broad ackses spiked ackses Made candul lanterns made ship lanterns three sided lantans Made horse shoos made cloth boilers and tea urns and flint strykers and cross bars for yer dutch ovens and stew pots an buckerts Made sords an all – all sorts of sords – court sords an huntin sords an cuttoes with engraved handels showing deer seens and forests and valleys and stags that did remaind us of home Made spoons and whissles and mouth harps and whizzer toys Made forged metal balls batted flat and strung on chains for the littleuns to whizz Everythynge that coud be melted and mowlded we did mayke with fire and mussel.
Dozens of men there was down there in the darkness Down in the black country swinging mallets turnin tongs and porin metal so hot it went the culler of the sun and ran like springe worter down a gill and drippin so much sweat we was there was allus a cue at the piggin to drink the water and cool your head And the steem – and the steem an the soot – so black yed be trippin over your own feet in the dork and the noise The noise of clangin an hissin and bashin and screechin
See when I struck out my brothers were but pups Issaik being seven years yunger than I and our Willyam a full nine year yunger and therefore both still hairless of the chin and not yet hardened to the world like I already was at sicksteen year or more Aye long dark thymes Davide Hartlee did spend down there Years I spent there Yers I werked all to one day become kynge of my own kyngdum And so it was And so it was And hear I yam.
And the base coin. The base coin is what else was made down in that place set close up the edges of Burningham I herd tell of it over tyme becors the secrets of the coinin is not sumthin a man tells a another man just willy nilly even when he’s in the drinke or cort at it No the clipper denighs every thin at orl thymes Its the code is that You dunt speek abart it to anywan but your own tried and trusstid Yor own blud if you can help it.
That’s a lessing Kinge David has learnt is that Hear me tell it now so that hisstory lerns from its misstaykes My misstaykes The lessuns of King David king of the Coiners no mattur what happerns And so I will tell it And so I will tell it true as is.
Like crows to the first pickings of carrion after the snow melt, from the four corners they walked.
Up they came and over they came and through they came. Many men.
Isaac Dewhurst and Absolom Butts.
Thomas Clayton and Benjamin Sutcliffe.
Abraham Lumb and Aloysius Smith and Nathan Horsfall and Matthew Hepworth and Joseph Gelder and Jonathan Bolton.
John Wilcox and Jonas Eastwood.
Fathers and brothers and sons and uncles. Up they came. And others too.
From across the moors; from all horizons.
They walked through bogs dried and cracked; they came through whin and gorse and lakes of wild sedge hung heavy with gobs of cuckoo spittle. Through the rutted trenches of dried-out streams they drove. Through ghylls that ran so shallow some had become nothing but a series of still, stagnant pools.
Up they came and over they came and through they came. Men. Tough men.
Working men.
Poor men, proud men. Desperate souls of the valley.
They bore nicknames such as Young Frosty and Mad Blood and Foxface. Tom O’ Freckles and John Coughing. Foul Peter. Double Stumps.
Men of stone and soil.
Benjamin Sutcliffe came from over Halifax. Still pimple-faced at sixty and an old brown wig upon his head.
Pox-pitted Nathan Horsfall from up Warley arrived with weaver William Clayton from Sowerby, the latter broad-set and flaxen-haired and wearing an auburn shag waistcoat.
Thin-faced Thomas Clayton brought his bones along from Turvin.
Isaac Dewhurst kissed his blind wife and left their dark house by the shallow stream in Luddenden Dean, his black hair uncovered and cheeks and jaw dusted black with stubble too.
Cherry-cheeked and handsome, John Tatham downed tools and let his long strong legs lead him down the Wadsworth slopes. Crowther O’Badger came rasping from Sweet Oak.
Up through Bell Hole they strode, the woodland canopy covering them and disguising their intentions. Up through the steepest grass slopes of Bell Hole they came, climbing them hand over foot as if it were a ladder to the expansive sky.
John Wilcox took the short walk from his home at Keelham Farm just over the brow.
John Parker and James Green came up whistling together.
Jonas Eastwood from along the Erringden Moor.
Joseph Gelder was another from over Fax in a fair-coloured Drab coat and waistcoat to match.
Red-haired Matthew Hepworth had set off early and walked all the way from Ovenden.
Others too.
James Crabtree and William Harpur and Joseph Hanson in a brown bob wig worn askance to obscure his hairless curd-white pate.
Past the mere-stones that marked their turf they strode, with grass stems between their teeth and dandelion seed heads in their hair, and barbed burrs clinging to shirts that stuck to their backs in circular patches of sweat salt.
The breeze blessed their hot brows and their matted hair and the copper-bottomed stream waters ran clear, for it was an unusually dry spring day and Yorkshire was unfolding around them. The winter had been mild and the tight cloughs through w
hich they ambled were in bloom, the first snowdrops having already been and gone, nodding as if in reverence for this clandestine gathering. It had not rained for days and as the saying went the dale without rain was as rare as the lamb that doesn’t like to leap. Soon it would come, of course. The rain. It always did.
But for now the valley was bursting in a violent flowering of flora and leaves unfurling and branches stretching and ragwort reaching and nettles – especially nettles – vying for the sky. Great dense patches of them grew, four and five and six feet deep, impenetrable swathes of dark green bracts that advertised their danger. Elsewhere lower meadows were flowing thick with the first buttercups, the fine white fuzz of drifting dandelion seeds and the silken slung threads of settled kiting spiders.
Clouds hung in billows like blankets of wool drying after the dye vat and there were new scents on the breeze: mint and thyme and woodsmoke, and the released perfume that swirls around boscage and thicket as it is trampled underfoot.
The smell of spread pig scat hung over the top fields too, fresh and strong and sweet and astringent. It was the busy spell after the first birthings, a time for growth and feeding. The season for nest-lining and house-building. A time of plenty for the insects and the lambs and rabbits, and the deer too, as they tentatively wandered down from the woodlands where they wintered, their nostrils decoding the messages in the ether.
And still they came, the men. Up and over and through. Some in pairs and some alone. They arrived an hour either side of the sun rising highest in the sky.
Jonathan Bolton.
Thommo Sunderland.
Others still. From the dells and dales and dingles. The four-house hamlets. From lone homesteads in the spinney and the dank smallholdings built where the waters ran by. From the windowless back rooms and cramped upstairs quarters of the beer inns. From the forges and farm and looms. From deep in the trees whose dark forming corridors they rarely left.
William Hailey and Peter Barker, better known as Foul Peter. His hair tied tight and hanging down his neck like a mole strung from a fence.
Jonas Tilotson, who rode a skittish horse in from Mixenden.
Israel Wilde arrived last, his ankle swollen and already berry-blue after cockling at the top of Hatherself Scout.
Up through Bell Hole they walked, stepping over moss-clogged runnels and fallen limbs half-submerged in the woodland soil. Bell Hole was the moor’s footnote, its overflow and midden pit. Its ugly sibling. Its shadow clough.
Crispin Crowther.
Brian Dempsey.
Eli Hoyle and Eli Hill.
Ely Crossley.
Their soundtrack was birdsong: dozens of contrasting avian calls that resounded through the church-like stillness of the place. Some wove into harmonious patterns before disentangling. Others still – the crows were loudest – sang with the waggish volume of vagabonds stumbling out from an ale house.
John Pickles
James Stansfield
Paul Taylor.
Slipping and sliding. Gasping and striding. Men whose family names were as much a part of the terrain as the boundary marker stones that mapped the moors and fractioned their tight territories from the days of the old wapentake. These were family handles deep rooted and double-tied to time and place, just as was the Hartleys’, for that name was as much a part of the valley’s foundation as the gritstone bed from which Bell House was gouged and sculpted.
Here on the moor edge the earth smelled like a basket of broken goose eggs, and patterns swirled on the surface of puddles that were fed only by droplets falling from the moss that tasselled the moor edge, millions of beaded specks like tiny interconnected green stars as if a manikin galaxy had sprung from the soil. Even during a drought time such as this the moor was rarely dry, a wet rag never fully wrung.
It took the stubborn scavengers and the stealthy to live up here. The cunning and the vicious. The solitary and the half-mad.
The buzzard and the raven. The polecat and the pine marten.
The hare, the fox and the adder.
Here lived those wild and red in pointed tooth and curled claw, and alongside them were those that walked on two legs and lived in houses but still emulated many of the upland creatures’ feral ways. Quarrymen and poachers. Tinkers and trappers and hermits. Men that did not want to be found. Men who made myths of their own mad delusions.
Here they gathered.
With them the men brought provisions, token offerings to their recently-found figurehead. Gifts for a king who had assumed sovereignty over his own fiefdom.
Nathan Horsfall brought a flour sack of apples, each wrapped in rags since autumn past.
On unsteady legs Matthew Hepworth carried a jug that had nothing in it but the scent of ale drunk.
Joseph Gelder had a piece of salt pork scored and saved for King David Hartley himself.
John Tatham had a loaf. John Wilcox brought berries.
Foul Peter Barker carried a pheasant he had thrown his full weight on and idly plucked on the way, the light down feathers accidentally decorating his sleeveless waistcoat. William Hailey offered a tea cake. Abraham Lumb treacle.
They brought blades and shears and hammers. Stamps and dyes and tongs. Moulds and spelters.
And some – not many, a few – brought coins.
These they had taken from their hiding places in the woods and crags, from deep in the twisted roots and bouldered cracks to stow about their bodies, wrapped in rags and held under arms or lagged to bandy legs. Tucked into waistbands, slotted into false hems.
Then out from Bell House stepped Isaac Hartley and behind him his younger brother, William Hartley II. They walked among the men nodding and exchanging words and greetings. The Duke Of York they called Isaac Hartley, and his was the familiar face to most. His hair was a heap of waxy curls and his mouth held gat-teeth between which he – but only he – joked you could pass a bootlace.
The Duke of Edinburgh was the name given to his younger brother, though that had yet to properly take because William Hartley was quieter than Isaac Hartley and time had not let his recently acquired moniker settle. He had come up younger than many of them. But they did know that he was as handy with his fists, for even as a young man of perhaps only fourteen years they had seen him on the cobbles on more than one occasion. Once he had slipped and broken a leg while fighting two packhorse lime-trail navvies single-handedly – witnesses had sworn to hearing the bone snap like stiff treacle tablet – but had fought on regardless, and still licked the pair of them, though one of his eyes had looked in on his nose for weeks afterwards.
William Hartley was red of hair and quiet of temperament, and known to speak only when necessary. The men knew that the big loud boys were rarely the ones you had to watch.
Isaac Hartley stood on the big stone that jutted from the ground like a bone and whose surface was worn smooth from years of sitting, and he said: Now listen lads there’s a fresh ferment done and there’s more than enough to go round until your head’s turned backways. Grace’s special mash, it is. There’s toasted oats and a pot of honey that goes into it.
A murmur of approval ran through the men.
Ale fit for a king is that, added his brother Isaac Hartley, the middle of the three siblings. I’ve tried it myself. Three stiff jars and you’ll think you’ve met with God.
There were smiles.
You can taste the moors on it, added William Hartley, more for effect rather than because he felt he had a particular opinion to share on the matter, but his words came out quiet so he cleared his throat and spoke more clearly: it’s the bees you see, he said. They make the best of these moors just like we intend to.
As if it had been orchestrated, at that moment Grace Hartley came out from the house carrying a jug and a fistful of pots. She passed them round and poured the ale as eyes followed her. Sitting at the back, where the cropped and culti
vated patch of grass turned wild as the moors ran off to greet the sky, James Broadbent grunted and whispered to Joe Gelder.
How it would please me to get my hands on that throddy birthing body, he said.
Joseph Gelder leaned towards him.
It’s as good a way to lose your hands as any, my friend.
How’s that? said James Broadbent. I fear no man.
Well you should fear this man.
What man?
You know which man.
Joseph Gelder discreetly gestured to the figure who was standing on the protruding stone in such a way it was as if he had been raised up on it from the underworld.
This man. Hartley. This man that’s welcomed you to his house. He’d have them off with a scythe as soon as wipe his arse with docks.
Well, said James Broadbent. He’d have to catch me with that piece of his first.
And there’s plenty of men here who’d be happy to swear witness, said Joseph Gelder. And not just his brothers. Trust me. This valley’s full of sneaksbys and blabbers. Besides, you’ve got neither the stiff stem or stones to please that woman. You can tell by looking at her. And looking at you too, you daft big link of dung.
Broadbent sniffed.
If I can get it up some bracket-faced sow down at Old Rose’s nugging house I’d be as hard as a happy horse with that one, don’t you worry about that. Oh, but to spend an hour in her hot notch.
James Broadbent whistled through pursed lips as Joseph Gelder laughed.
An hour? Who goes at it for an hour?
I do on the second or third time round, said James Broadbent. I’m known for it.
Are you now.
That I am. They call me the stone hammer. Just fill me with a jug of fresh-brewed stingo and watch me go. In hay-rick and hooer room, I’ve had them all. There’s a lass at Mixenden who walks with a limp and thanks me for it. Ask around.
I think I won’t.
James Broadbent leered as Grace Hartley poured the ale.
He nodded.
Yes. She’d get it good and long and hard.
The Gallows Pole Page 3