No, said The Alchemist.
Good, said David Hartley. Many do, but more fool them. This then makes you of a stronger mind than most men. You are more like us than you realise. The only thing you should put your trust in is that fire will burn and metal will melt and the stag will always be a-rutting on these moor tops.
Men mite laff and men mite mock behind mine back but I seen what I seen an I recorl it now so many very yers later as cleer as if it were yestadaye.
Yes it was a dark nite with the wind raised up and whisslin round the chimernee stack and arattlin the tyles it was and the moore was darke darke darke an I was but a mite of a boy A meer pup of a thynge still hairless an not yet put owt to werk An it was becors of this wind and the arattlin of the tyles and the winders that I was wide awayke and trubbled Yes my sleep it was diysturbed by the sound of the moore tryin to get into my room an the sound of the moore tryin to get into my bed and the moore tryin to get into my mind becors it can do that can the moore and no man can sleep in that state no Not unless thur in a coffing.
So I was layin there starin out into the prickly blooness of it all when the room doore did open of its own accord I herd the latch lift and the hinges creak and I spoke then I said Farther I cannot sleepe but no voice came in reply so I said Mothere what gives but all I sor for a moment was darkness No thinge but the still blue darkness of the eternel Yokshyre nite But then.
But then there was movement Yes there was bodees entring the room an I could only just mayke out the forms of them the shapes of them for ther was severul of them I durst call them men and you shall see why in a moment becors then they stept out into the frayme of moon lite that did cut throe the nite and fell throo the winder an onto the flore A patch of it layde their on the florbords there was An what did I see but men Men yes But with the heads of grayte stags Yes stags With antlas and nostrils flared and steem risin from ther pelts and the black black eyes of the deere that do rome the moores and the wuds and the glaydes and the vally edges But down below they were as I say men with mens bodees and the clothes of men and the boots an the legs and the hands of men and ther was menny of them mebbe four or fyve or six of them I recorl not.
And it was then that they did start up a dance inna circul around my roome four or fyve or sixe of them ther was These great stag men of the moors And they did dance and move so sylentlee as if there was no wayt to them at all as if they were flotin like clowds Silempt but for the sound of there breathing like the anymuls that they was Anymils as I say for no man Ive ever known has a pelt and a snouwt and antlers and does a midnite dance in the bedrooms of boys what live in the shadder of the darke dark moor.
And I did wach as they dipped and swerled an I durst not move nor speek nor breath nor nothen And the moon lite cort them in her gays and the stagmen of the moors did dance in ther circle An I watched on from beeneeth my blankyts full of fear and wunder not daring to move nor breeth nor nothing an that nite I did not sleepe a wink Instead I just sat there full of that fear not moving an hardlee brethin until the men had left so silentlee still and morning came At last my old freind morning And the moore did leeve my room did leeve my bed then it did leeve me alone and I finally found the curridge to run downstairs to my Faether and my Mothere now dead may her sowel rest in peece and I says.
I says I seenum I seenum the stagmen of the moors And they says what is it yor blethring abowt now eh And I says the grate stag men of the moores I seen them dance in a circle in the patch of moonlyt An they did laff and say what rot you gab yung Daevid Hartley what rot you tork and what dreams you have and what an imaginayshun And I says no no but I seenum and then my Mothere did say to my Farther its that cheese whats been givin him the fritely nitemares is what it is and they went about ther bisniss of cleenin the grate and yoking the ox and fetchin the eggs and porin the ale as if it were a normal daye.
But it was not a normal daye it was the day that changed me The day wot gave me fresh eyes and new beelefs and a sens of wonder and fear of what it is that this lande of mine can do and what it is that maykes these moores a place of magick and feer and what it is that goes on that we cannot understand up here and what it is that make rite minded folk stop away and keep these moors emptee and what is that maykes man and animal move as wan up heer where the land meets the sky and creechurs do dance and its all beyond boeth reesum and ecksplaynen.
Roots and radicles.
Cavities and corners. Caves and cromlechs.
Nooks and niches.
Stream heads and stream beds and rotting stumps.
Clefts and crannies. Cracks in the old cold wet rock.
Fissures and quarries. Gatepost holes. Dung traps.
Gravestone vases.
Old wasp’s nests even – tucked away into perfectly papered lanterns submerged in the crusted soil.
The coins began to appear from the pockets of men who had garnered them, some with promises and others by threat, all to be hidden away. The soil accepted them. The walls and the trees and the woodlands accepted them. The hovels and the hay-ricks too. Soon new coins and old coins were stowed there. Coins worn away on their journey through the hands of the poor and the very poor. The ill and the injured. Dirty discs. Golden guineas. Shilling pieces and florins, and silver bits scuffed black through transactions. Coins won and coins lost on dog fights and cock fights. Coins earned and spent in cups and jugs. Coins tossed. Coins lost. Coins for clipping, coins for breeding and buying and multiplying.
It was boom time.
All found their way from butcher’s aprons and baker’s flour boxes and publican’s pinafores; from draymen’s pockets and hostler’s handkerchiefs and hawker’s hats and cobbler’s waistcoats. From brogger’s wallets and colporteur’s coffers, into the hardened hands of the hardened hill men who had persuaded the traders of the valley to give up their gains for this great fraudulent venture, in exchange for a nice return and protection and discretion guaranteed.
Drawn like metal bits to a magnet, coins came in from foreign climes too. Lima shillings forged from Peruvian metal and Spanish pistoles and the Portugese moidores that had long circulated as legal tender in England, such was the imbalance of trade weighted in the English favour. Money was money. Metal metal. Coin coin. And soon the valley was flooding with the rattling rush of new money.
Into the hands of Eli Hoyle and William Hailey and Jonathan Bolton it went. Into the hands of John Pickles and Jonas Eastwood and Thomas Clayton. Into the hands of William Harpur and Joseph Hanson. John Tatham and William Folds.
Coins collected and collated and buffed and burnished, these ill-gotten gains were stashed in pouches and secreted at night – always at night, for the moon was in on the coining too – in places pre-arranged. The valley’s bank they called it. The bank of hill-tops and hidden ravines; of forest and field, of coins stashed beneath boulders and cow troughs. By rat’s nests under coops, shit-dripped and bird-pecked. In the seed of the pheasant feeder left by a gamekeeper in on another game. Squeezed flat beneath the chocks and hearting and copes of a dry-stone wall made drier still by another unexpected week of drought. In sike bottoms and clough clearings too.
Most in the valley gave up their coin readily, for the promise of getting half the value back again on top for their troubles was too good to refuse. There were those whose resistance was expected – the doctor and the book learner; the man of the cloth and the old maid who stumbled stooping to the same pew each day and twice on Sundays to hear his re-heated sermons. Those who refused to be part of the game. These received first a word of stern warning and then another visit from not one but two or three or more of David Hartley’s men. The same men each time. Those with the fullest shadows and the fewest teeth. Those with the ebonised eyes and little to lose. Knuckle men. Muscle men. Not numbers men or head men. Not Hartleys but hired hands.
Keen men. Cruel men. Chief amongst them Absolom Butts and James Broadbent.
Brian Dempsey
and Paul Taylor.
Young, mad, blood-drunk Aloysius Smith.
At night they always came when the candles were snuffed and the dogs made soft and slow by the glow of the moaning logs in the grate.
The gentle rap of a cudgel on a door frame or a pebble lobbed to a lonely unlit window or the mere sight of the huddle by the log-store on a moonless night was often enough to turn uncertain minds towards the coining cause.
But still a handful resisted, citing justice, God and morality as their reasons. Honour to the king and crown.
For these men there came back-ginnel beatings and stamped ankles. Daubings on their doors, their fattened family pigs slit and left bleeding in black pools, their store-rooms burnt. There were further nocturnal visitations too, their wives or daughters dragged and shoved and groped and poked and gang-fucked down darkened lanes by Coiners with corn sacks about their heads, their rancid breath reeking of beer and bacco and beef collop.
And soon, in time, these resisting men of principle and God and righteousness gave up their coins to the cause of a new king too. Through hands and from holes and hiding places their currency reached Isaac Hartley and William Hartley, because by now David Hartley barely saw nor touched this brilliant stream of cold metal that like a miracle from the big book itself flowed uphill all the way to the crest of this new kingdom he had constructed over just two summers or so.
The back end of the cart was piled high with flour sacks and in each there was a loaf and some cured meat, some tallow fat candles and vegetables freshly-pulled from the Upper Calder Valley soil: parsnips and russet potatoes, carrots and leeks and mangelwurzels for those who kept livestock on their smallholdings. There was a plug of tobacco and some fat rascal cakes and wedged blocks of cheese and shives of pig fat and pickles and chutneys too. Beside the sack there were three barrels of ale, a jug and a bag of coins. Balls of butter bobbed in a bucket of cold milk.
The cart moved slowly crossways along Heights track from the tiny township of Midgely, the whole valley splayed out below. To the east, Sowerby Bridge and beyond it, hidden by hills, the town of Halifax. Then to the west Hebden Bridge and Heptonstall perched perilously above it on a spur of land between two densely wooded gorges on either side and the moor pressing up against its rear, its houses turned inwards like nested fledglings sheltering from a storm.
Below, the river moved like molten lead through Mytholmroyd and beyond it, where the houses ended and the hills became blurred through the wavering haze of the afternoon light, a narrowing streak of tapered woodlands darkened upwards to a tiny dot in the distance where the moors began, only visible to those who sought to see it: Bell House.
Other things sat behind the man that steered the cart and his companion who stepped down with a sack of gifted goods for every friend of the Coiners along the route: blankets and eyeglasses for the elderly, pairs of clogs old and new in different sizes, passed-down clothes cleaned and darned for a second wearing. Breeches and shirts and stockings. There were wigs. Clay pipes. Children’s toys.
The front end of the cart was stacked with split logs, seasoned and ready for burning. It was the best wood that there was – a choice pick of ash and beech, hawthorn and horse chestnut.
A lone house loomed along the Heights track, that of half-blind Robert Howland who slept before a fire with a half dozen dogs around him.
The cart pulled up and the men climbed down. The first carried with him one of the sacks weighted with produce while the second began to roll logs down into the crook of his arms.
They knocked on the door and shouted Coiners coming Robert Howland, Coiners coming, and then they waited for the old man to answer.
Screens of shimmering smoke shot through with shades of umber and sepia rose in the far distance like the ragged backdrop of a tired troupe of travelling players unveiling the day’s performance.
It was the turning time. It was the burning of the heather time.
These nebulous rectangles hung on the horizon like the flags of an unseen returning army, held in the haze a fata morgana, before dissipating into stray wisps and twists that were taken by a breeze. The scorched smoke of burned peat and the bone-dry pungent heather gave the breeze a shape and a purpose; draped in smoke it was made physical.
The best of the heather had already been clipped and picked for the making of besoms. The longest branches and thickest clusters had been cut to size and bundled around a stout pole – always willow – by those solitary bodgers and gamekeepers’ wives who had gained the landowner’s permission to do so, and who sang the same song as they worked at home with blade and cord, always to a melody that followed a descending glissando of notes:
Buy broom buzzems,
Buy them when they’re new,
Fine heather bred uns,
Better never grew.
The heather’s flowers too had been taken and set to boil in pots or hung to dry in clusters from mullions and over inglenooks, their mauve colourings turning darker with the darkening of shortened days bookended by nights that birthed new mythologies from old fears.
The remaining heather of the valley was burned at the behest of the few. Men unseen. Landowners who rarely walked the land they owned, let alone lived on. These were men from the cities, who spent their days away paving turnpikes and building mills. Sinking canals and striking deals. Buying and selling. Traders. Sons of the empire, the aristocratic architects of England’s new future. Men for whom too much was never enough.
Their estate work was done by land managers and it was these who took the heather plant and used it in brewing the ale that filled their master’s bow-roofed cellars, while others used the cleared barren moorland spaces for housing hives for their honey-making. Sheep and deer grazed up there and grouse nested in it too, but mainly the heather was used for the dyeing of the wools, its branches for besom brooms.
The slow smoke drifted down now to settle on the houses of those weavers and land workers who lived in the hamlets and farmsteads that sat below the moor line. The scent of it was the latest subtle signal to mark autumn’s tightening grip on the land.
The incoming season meant death and soon the trees were to become bone-like, and their leaves would gather in drifts down in the lanes, and the animals were already gorging themselves before the cold time announced itself in a famine of nothing but frost and fire and flickering candles.
Come April the pitch-coloured rectangles of burnt heather shadows would be dotted with the white fingers of new shoots peeping through, though as this summer past withered and died, slowly curling in on itself into crisp husks and falling tiny skeletons, the very thought of next spring’s re-birth seemed beyond realisation for most in the valley, an impossibility, a wild, fanciful vision of the deluded.
Across the moor and through the drapes of smoke he came.
His red waistcoat marked him out; he knew as much.
Indeed he wanted the eyes of the hills to be on him, to note him. To be made aware of his presence.
He carried with him a bag and in the bag was fruit and bread and meat packed for him by his wife, and a pipe that he had recently taken to smoking, though his children disliked the smell of it on his breath when he kissed them goodnight. He also had with him a crudely-drawn map with the named hamlets and farmsteads marked upon it, and beside each a list of known families and members. Against those he suspected of partaking in the yellow trade he had marked a red X. He had other items with him too: matches and a candle. A mirror. A knife.
A fine rain was coming in. William Deighton watched it comb the valley in waves.
He walked with the purpose of a man who considered the moors as much his as anyone’s. This was his belief and these hills he felt were familiar to those of a childhood spent amongst moorlands and secret darkened tributary valleys so similar.
Things had been different then. He told his wife this often.
Five decades
earlier the hills and moors and woods of youth had been William Deighton’s playgrounds. Each holme and royd was there to be explored. Each thwaite and clough.
An inquisitive boy with strong lungs, he could walk for eighty furlongs through the landscape and learn much about life then. He remembered seeing secret gin stills and stone skep niches for the keeping of bees. He had crossed streams by slippery staup hoyles – the old name for the stepping rocks slick with spray and worn smooth by centuries of feet. He found hidden ponds rippling thick with pike so big they had been known to pull cats and dogs under, and in winter he saw waterfalls that had frozen solid into great glass shapes resembling strange creatures from tales of times now gone.
He witnessed strange things in quarries too. Oddness. He heard noises up top. Stalked deer. Watched foxes and brocks – and felt himself being watched too. He walked always with a sense of there being witnesses close by. Hidden but watching; and he heard further tales too of strange moortop doings.
But he had always been left alone, free to walk the valley unhindered, returning to town at night, stiff and spent and happy.
And now the valley was controlled by this insidious breed whose influence was killing the trade of the town, the Cragg Vale Coiners, whose reputation had already spread to the Palace of Westminster.
It did not look good for him, William Deighton, sole representative of the crown, tax collector for Halifax and its surrounds, excise-man and upholder of the law in an increasingly lawless land. He had been warned: the authoritarian grip was weakening and this way outright anarchy beckoned. The responsibility to restore order fell upon his shoulders alone.
So he wanted to be watched. Wanted to be seen and marked and noted by these men they called the Cragg Vale Coiners because they needed to know that their trade could not go on unnoticed. Would not go on unpunished. He had sworn to the King and the King he would serve.
The Gallows Pole Page 6