Absolom Butts. Brian Dempsey. Paul Taylor.
He shielded the heatless sun from his eye and squinted towards them.
Gentleman of the hills, he said breezily. He touched his hat and then took a side-step so as to let the men pass and get a better view of them.
And a fine day it is to view God’s country, he added.
When the men said nothing he made to carry on upwards to the moor but Paul Taylor blocked his path.
What’s the rush now stranger?
No rush, gentlemen. No rush at all.
And where is it you are coming from?
Well now – that’s a good question.
So flourish it with a answer then.
I’m not so sure there’s an easy answer.
Try, said Paul Taylor
I come from here and there and go where the work is, said the bodger.
What work? What business do you have in these hills?
The man pushed his hat back on his head and wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve. Wiped his top lip. Wiped his neck.
Well now, in the summer I wander and offer my skills and services and in the winter I do much the same, only I make sure I’m never more than a half day’s walk from a hearth and my good lady wife’s warm white body. It’s all a man needs on a cold night.
And what about this dead season when the leaves fall and the animals gather their stores and the birds line their nests, said Paul Taylor. What then?
The bodger shrugged.
That depends.
There’s nothing up here on these moors for you – or anyone else.
He’s a thieving no good tinker is what he is, said Brian Dempsey. He’s a cursed gypsy, this one. He’ll bring trouble.
The man shook his head. He vehemently protested.
No, he said. No sir. I’m no tinker sir. No, no. A man of the road, yes. But a tinker I am not.
Well you look like one and you talk like one, said Paul Taylor.
And you smell like one, added Absolom Butts.
Curses in the Romany tongue and the shearing of the heather is not my business, replied the stranger. I’m something far superior than your common tinsmith and rag trader.
What are you then?
The stranger stood proud.
I am a bodger, sir. A bodger and boardwright. Tables and chairs are my main trade. Bowls and baskets too. Building and fixing. Rectifying and remedying.
The men stared back in silence. He cleared his throat.
I’m good with wood, he added.
Where did you apprentice?
Where? Right here in the woodlands of England, lads. Right here amongst the beech and the birch. The hawthorn and the hazel. The whitebeam and the willow. With these hands I can craft just about anything. The trees taught me every lesson I need to know.
And now we’re going to teach you one more, said Brian Dempsey. These is the king’s woods.
The king? said the bodger.
Aye. King David of the Craggs.
I know nothing of a King David.
Brian Dempsey laughed then Brian Dempsey spat. He spat at the feet of the bodger. Something green, flecked with red.
He says he knows nowt of the king and if he knows nowt of the king then he’s not paid his dues to the king.
Everyone has heard of King David Hartley, said Paul Taylor. The man who says he hasn’t is a liar. Tell us bodger – why are you really here skulking in these woods?
The stranger looked from one of imposing men to the other. Each in turn.
As I said, I’m just passing through, lads. From one place to the next.
And where might that next place be?
Wherever these feet take me. An honest coin for honest work. That’s all I’m after.
He mentions coins lads – and honest ones at that said Paul Taylor.
Is there any other type? said Brian Dempsey.
Now, said Paul Taylor. Who really sent you? Was it the devil Deighton?
He stepped closer to the bodger as he said this. The bodger looked straight at Paul Taylor’s Adam’s apple, small and hard in his throat now.
He raised his hands in protest.
Lads, he said. I really don’t know anything that you speak of.
The bodger turned back to the trees. The bodger turned back to Bell Hole. He made to go back the way he had come.
I think I best be upon my way.
I do believe this one is here to do the dog bastard Deighton’s dirty work, said Brian Dempsey, clamping a hand on his shoulder. He’s here to bring down the king.
The bodger fell as the fists and clogs came. A hail of them. He was stamped and kicked down into the trees. Down out of sight into the crisp dead leaves. Absolom Butts and Brian Dempsey and Paul Taylor said nothing as they thumped and pounded and worked and grunted and clumped and punched and slugged and sweated. With feet and knuckles. With fists and elbows. Then logs and rocks. The bodger said nothing either for his body soon went limp and his eyelids twitched and his fingers slowly curled in on themselves as if grasping some unseen implement but Absolom Butts and Brian Dempsey and Paul Taylor did not stop. Absolom Butts and Brian Dempsey and Paul Taylor carried on punching the man, an honest man who was good with wood, whose hands were flecked with nicks and splinters, and who had a wife and children relying on him at home.
Down into the trees. In the dirt.
The crisp dead leaves beneath him.
They kicked until the branches closed in overhead, the trees’ lissom limbs intertwining to form a latticed ceiling as the men opened the bodger up and broke him down and he blossomed with rising blood that turned to bruising clots, and then his bones became crooked useless things and his face a hot swollen mask, his hair wrenched out in clumps that drifted away in the gentle breeze like the empty husks of insects that had hatched and shed their former selves.
The bodger was put in soil scraped out with fingers and nails. Left there in this ripe bed. Inhumed. The shallowest of lazy graves.
His tools were taken. Coins kept.
The dirt kicked back over.
He was not yet quite dead when he was buried in the Bell Hole soil but the spores and stems of tomorrow’s dawn-rising mushrooms welcomed him all the same.
Now see this man I know nowt about Swear down nowt for I am not my brothars keeper nor can I ackownt for the things it is that other lads did or do Killen a man stone dayde is just wrong is that Playne wrong when he is not meddlin or stealin your coin or rustlin your lyfestock or fixen to get you eckseycuted or fucken your wifey behind your back or fucken your wifey and your wifeys sister behind your back and your wifeys back or none of that No if its just a worken man of the countrayside a good Jórvíkshire man just goan about his bisness a man with skills and sweat on his underputs and a wife of his own back home sweepen the harth for him and who knows mebbay there is chillum there too and all he has is the misfortune to come across the worst ones in the coinin gang thems we do call the knucklemen The very worst ones The ones that would slap the teeth out of there own mothers mouth or lock their auld fathers in the cow byre for the night And mebbes they are ecksiteable that perticler day but even if that be so still they only did what they did because they are loyale to ther kinge you see Loyal to the first thing in their godfursaykun lives The first thin they can beleef in and be a part of and the first thin that has put clothes on their back and money in the pockets of ther new fustian wool suits and who knows maybe brought wimmin folk to there door too So you see vishus murderus barberus no good dirty bastids they might be but they only do what they do out of respect and loyalty to the Cragg vale Coiners them fellas what run together in the toughest meanest smartest bestist valley mob the whole wirl ever did see.
But as I say I know nowt about no poor bodger so you best not be askin us any more about it.
An almighty s
ound split the night, an elemental crack and crash of rock and rubble.
To James Broadbent asleep in his bed it sounded like the gunpowder claps of a worked quarry but he knew no quarryman would be mining in the deep dark witching hours.
Up the hill from his lodgings in Scout Rock wood a great hunk of rock the size of a small outbuilding had peeled away from the jagged cliffs that jutted out above the trees and come tumbling down the slopes. As it fell it smashed and uprooted trees, dragging them in its wake part way down, the splintering echo of their momentum ringing the bell of the three-quarter moon. And then another smaller piece followed, a hundred hands round and as heavy as many dead horses.
Young William Wilcox could not avoid it as he fled stumbling and slipping in the soil of the plateau deep in the centre of the wood where he had hidden the purse of creamed coins that he had been slowly stashing in secret over the past several months. He had been reaching deep into the roots of a tree when the first rock had fallen, and it was as if God himself was smiting him for his transgression with the tumbling of the second one. He had reached deeper still for the purse then, for he was only after two coins to give to his mother to pay for her pease pudding and peat hags. He had pulled it out from the moss and soil and turned and ran, the sound of fear rising up through his throat as God’s fearful echo reported back on itself from one valley side to another.
He died in an instant, though not before the fearful shadow of the tumbling rock had grown over and round him, eclipsing everything he had known in his short life as the blackness swallowed him and the cold rock that was as old as anything on earth turned him into a pulped mess of bones and flesh, flattened him between stone and mud, the mashed remains of what was once a hand matted around the bag of stolen golden guineas, whose disappearance, like that of the boy himself, would remain a mystery never to be solved by any man or woman of the valley.
Down the hill James Broadbent sat up in his bed. Several Mytholmroyd residents did. Each waited and listened but there was nothing but the strange silence that comes in the aftermath of movement. It was a silence that was tangible, but when no other noise followed he put it down to his disturbed sleep, and the ale, and the many things that haunted his mind, and then he lay back and closed his eyes.
There was knocking. Bone flesh on stout seasoned bone-dry door.
Fetch that will you, William Deighton said to his wife but then said: wait, no, let me.
He opened it onto a bleary-looking James Broadbent; onto the night.
William Deighton leaned out into Bull Close Lane and when he saw no-one else was out there he said to James Broadbent come in then. He led him into the back kitchen where mugs and plates and knives and forks sat freshly washed and stacked, and the range kicked out some vicious heat that to James Broadbent was welcome.
William Deighton poured him some tea from a pot on the range top and then poured one for himself. He gestured for James Broadbent to sit.
Well?
James Broadbent sipped the tea and then sniffed at it and sipped again. It was not a taste he was familiar with. Hot drinks he rarely took.
You’re still after the king?
Of course I am, said William Deighton. You know I am.
You and the other fellow. This Parker one.
Yes. And we have supporters too. We have spoken with magistrates. Men of influence in Bradford. They have vowed their support. The full force of the law is behind us. Now I just need to catch Hartley at it.
So you’ll still be needing my help, said James Broadbent through a puzzled scowl.
Your help would surely end this sooner, yes. And you’ll have surely heard that three more men sit in chains in York. John Pickles of Wadsworth Law is one. Stephen Marton of Stainland another. James Oldfield of Warley the third.
For what?
You know for what. Being caught with the implements of the trade.
James Broadbent did not look up from his tea.
Does the offer still stand though? he asked.
The offer?
The reward of money, said James Broadbent.
Yes. But you have to fully commit to the right side. The truthful side. Your Martons and Oldfields are all good and well but it is Hartley that will end this. It is he who I want.
The two men fell silent for a moment before James Broadbent spoke.
I have something.
What? What do you have?
Information.
Go on, said William Deighton
There’s talk of having you done for, said James Broadbent.
Done for?
Aye.
What do you mean?
There’s talk amongst some of the lads of seeing you dead.
What lads?
All the lads.
And how do you know this?
Because I was there to hear it with my own ears.
Where?
At Hartleys. At Bell House.
When was this?
Only a few days back.
William Deighton put down his cup.
And how do they propose to do this. What method?
Method?
Yes. How did they discuss they would kill me?
No way particular, shrugged James Broadbent. They just talked general, like.
Was it Hartley that proposed my killing?
Aye. I think perhaps it was.
Well either it was or it wasn’t.
Then it was.
Don’t say it was him if it wasn’t.
It was, nodded James Broadbent. He called a meeting. Dragged us up there.
How many men were present?
Hard to say.
Try.
Fifteen. Only the best of us.
And he thinks you’re one of his best men does he – Hartley I mean?
James Broadbent shrugged.
Must do.
Because I thought that David Hartley said you were as useless as a lame donkey.
He said that?
No, said William Deighton. It’s just an assumption.
Because I’d pull the stuffing out of any man with my bare teeth who said that.
Including a passing stranger?
What passing stranger?
They say a man went missing thereabouts, said William Deighton.
What man? asked James Broadbent. Where?
A worker.
A valley man?
No. A travelling man. A man of the woods.
Where?
Between Mytholmroyd and the moor.
That could be a lot of places. The moor is everywhere you go.
He was seen entering Bell Hole.
Travelling men travel, said James Broadbent. It’s their nature to be missing.
I think something befell him.
Like what?
William Deighton sipped his tea.
I think he met some men.
What men?
Your men.
I have no men.
You know who I’m driving at, said William Deighton. Fellow clippers. They say he was a bodger out looking for work. A decent fellow. Family minded. Might be that it was round about the time of this meeting that Hartley called.
I know nothing of no bodger, said James Broadbent. And that’s the truth of it.
But say there was one.
What of it?
And say he went a-wandering up onto the moor.
It’s a free country.
Is it though? wondered William Deighton. Say he crossed some Coiners coming down from Hartleys. And say these man were drunk on the threats of a king suspicious of all-comers. A king talking about killing off me, a man of the crown.
James Broadbent nodded slowly.
It is a possibility.
Then what wo
uld you do?
James Broadbent considered this for a moment.
Me? I would question this man. I would ask his family name and what business it was he had being up there where the land meets the sky and strangers do no pass through. I would warn this man.
Just warn him?
Yes. I would warn him with great persuasion. To him I would say this is still the kingdom of the shitneck King David dog-breath Hartley—
I think you would hardly use those words.
I would say what I wanted for I no longer hold my tongue for any man, fake king or real pauper alike.
Go on then, said William Deighton.
Yes, said James Broadbent warming to the subject. I would say this is the kingdom of the bastard King David bastard Hartley and this is no place for a lowly bodger. You’d be minded to watch the bogs that suck you under and the Hartley brothers who will pull the piss from your pecker. I would say watch out for that David Hartley especially, for this man is prone to mad visions and strange reckonings—
William Deighton raised a palm.
Wait. What mad visions?
James Broadbent grinned wolfishly.
Oh yes. They say he sees creatures dancing in his room. They say he does believe that men become animals and animals become men and together they dance like man and wifey in the moonlight. All his life he has talked of these things he sees that no other man does. He is not right in the head, is David Hartley. That’s why I’m telling you this: how could I follow the law of a man who sees animals dancing in his bedroom? Such talk will bring trouble to his own door – mark my words. When David Hartley swings the valley will have one less man gone mad with the moorland fever. But for now you must watch your neck Mr Deighton.
One hundred guineas, said William Deighton. A further one hundred guineas I will give you out of my own pocket if you serve me Hartley.
They’ll come after me.
With one hundred guineas you can live well a long way from here said William Deighton.
James Broadbent stared at his mug. He stared deep into it and at the dregs of leaves clotted in the bottom too, and he nodded. He said: for a further one hundred guineas on top of what is already coming to me I believe I would do most anything.
The Gallows Pole Page 15