You should have eaten.
Eaten what? said James Broadbent. Our boots? We’ve got nothing.
There is ale at my house and food if you want it. You can stop there a while.
It is full rest that my father needs.
Joseph Broadbent nodded in agreement.
Or a ride, he croaked.
A ride?
Aye, said James Broadbent. On your horse.
William Deighton shook his head and clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth.
This horse belongs to the county of the West Riding, which in turn is funded by the crown itself. This is a king’s horse, man. It’s not for the likes of you two.
What do you mean by that, said James Broadbent. The likes of us two?
Are you not a member of the Cragg Vale Coiners?
I were, said James Broadbent. You know that and you also know that I’m not anymore, neither. And my father here never was. He burns the charcoal.
But until you have done what it is I have paid you to do you are Coiners, the both of you.
I’ve given you names.
How do I know you’re not still working for Hartley?
Because I said so, snapped James Broadbent. How do I know you’re not just some pettifogger who is going to turn me out into the ditch like a tick-bitten dog with the mange? How do I know you’re not going to serve me up hog-tied and fire-roasted to David shithouse Hartley and his bleeding brothers?
Because I am a man of my word, said William Deighton. One of the very last by all account.
I am a man of my word too – and mark my word when I say I’ll slit the throat of any man that dares to double cross me.
This James Broadbent said with a snarl, his bared teeth bestial in the moonlight.
William Deighton looked at the man crouched across from him, and his father. They were but sorry shapes; two dark blue silhouettes.
Be very careful with those words, forger.
James Broadbent spoke quietly.
These woods are dense and dark, Mr Deighton.
And the gibbet is strong, Mr Broadbent.
They are endless.
And you have signed a statement that is already long locked away in a magistrate’s chambers have you not?
Between them the old man coughed again.
Listen to him, said James Broadbent. My father is crying cockles. He is not a Coiner.
Saying that twice doesn’t make it so. Besides, he spawned one.
He is here for my concern, that is all.
Well then, said William Deighton. We must make haste and get this man to his bed where he needs to be.
By horseback?
By foot, of course.
You would have this man walk the long dark miles rather than let him onto your nag?
To put him on my horse would be against the crown’s law that decrees that all horses are only for those in the employ of royal business. I’ve already told you.
His insides are shot from the charcoaling Mr Deighton. He is on his last legs. No-one would know.
I would know, said William Deighton. He’ll be right. A jug of ale and a good sleep is all this man needs. It’s not far now.
The old man looked from his son to William Deighton.
How far mister?
Not far. Only an hour. Two at the most.
Joseph Broadbent coughed and then groaned.
William Deighton turned and walked back to his horse.
I need a pipe, said the old man. Just a couple of toots on a hockle-cutter would see me right. Let me rest a while and have a pipe.
Smoke is not what you need, said William Deighton as he mounted. Think on this instead: imagine what Hartley and his cohorts would say if they saw you two sorry sacks walking through the valley with the dreaded exciseman Deighton on a bright autumn morning. The darkness is your friend. You’d be wise to keep that in mind. The darkness is all that’s keeping them from you. The darkness and my knowledge of the best way through it. So let us get moving while the night still favours us.
Raindrops danced around them like diminishing sparks. It spotted across the distant hills in forms that shifted shape – vague apparitions stripping the mottled sky of its stars until rain and night and the scratching of trees around them, and the flexing haunch of the horse upon whom they rested their heads, was all that they knew.
When they finally reached the outskirts of Halifax the old man had to be lifted to the chair by the fire in William Deighton’s kitchen by his son. Awoken, Deighton’s wife placed the old man’s hat back on his head.
They rested and ate and drank and the old man slept and they warmed themselves, and then when the time came James Broadbent helped his father to the door and the cold air that blew in from Bull Close Lane seemed to rouse him for Joseph Broadbent was just about able to stand unaided. He leaned against the doorframe.
At the doorstep his son paused.
It’s an ill draft that blows in, said William Deighton.
Aye it is.
The walk and that belly of food will warm you though.
With his back to him, James Broadbent nodded.
Well then, said William Deighton. Be in or out but don’t just stand there letting Jack Frost pay us a visit.
The money, said James Broadbent.
What?
I’ll be needing them hundred guineas then.
William Deighton shook his head.
I don’t keep that sort of money around the house.
James Broadbent turned to him then.
You swore on it.
Indeed I did. Though I believe I swore to deliver one hundred guineas to you from my own pocket for information that leads to the arrest of King David Hartley of the Cragg Vale Coiners.
Well then.
Well then. When he is arrested you will be paid.
This not a fair game that you play Deighton.
And is forgery, corruption, intimidation and violence fair? No it is not. You must wait.
James Broadbent turned to his father.
Do you hear what this so-called man of honour says to me father – that I must wait for my money?
Joseph Broadbent nodded meekly. He was beyond conversation.
I thank you for your help tonight gentleman but I would advise you to keep your counsel, said William Deighton, ushering both men out into the street. You’d be wise to remember I have enough on you for capital charges and wiser still to note that if Hartley is not arrested you do not get paid. If he were to hear that you have been collaborating with me, well…
He left the sentence dangling there for a moment.
He is not known for his mercy, now is he? I bid you well.
He shut the door.
For a time the wind was up and it rattled at the stable’s shutters but then it dropped and all the night was still. Inside the air was thick with the sweet funk of the horses.
They were never entirely at rest. As one slept another rearranged itself. A third shook its mane for even in October the flies were still gathering around the warm wet fleshy pockets of their eyes, noses and mouths. Horse flies and black flies and stable flies. Some laid their eggs in open sores and others feasted on equine blood. The cold of winter would kill them off but for now they circulated, then settled, then circulated again, locked in a perpetual cycle of irritation for their hosts.
There was the sound of a metal shoe on stone and the slow rustle of the chewing of tufts of hay pulled in greedy clumps from broad summer bales, then the fleshy snort of a sleeping horse deep in a dream of galloping across open meadows, its memory reaching back to somewhere deep as it ran with the herd, thundering through woodlands as around it other horses fell into its stride, their hooves tearing up the soil, the boles of coppiced trees flashing by as if moving around them, and then sud
denly bursting as one into a stubbin to rest and breathe and drink water as the sun played upon their steaming necks. It was a dream of experience and sinew intertwined, memories held in muscle. The solid core of something that stretched through thousands of centuries.
In the bluest part of night a slit of light grew broad for a moment and then narrowed again. Expanded and contracted. There were footsteps on the byre stone. There were hushed voices too, then the sound of a candle being lit and the faces of two men caught at the very limit of the flame’s reach. They moved the candle around and saw the creatures in their stalls – some were sitting with legs tucked under, others still standing. The light framed the large eye of one horse and its black pupil grew larger still and fearful in the glare of the dancing flame. The men moved onto the next stall. One nodded to the other. He gestured with his chin to the standing horse, whose hide appeared russet coloured in the gloomy elastic night.
That one, he whispered.
The other looked. Blinked. His hot breath hanging in the cold night.
Are you sure?
I know those markings. That horse is yon devil Deighton’s.
He raised the candle and ran it around the outline of the horse, tracing its form. He spoke with eyes. His eyes said: go on then.
From his coat his companion pulled out a large pair of cloth shears, their handles worn smooth with years of use, the forged blades blackened by dirt and time. He stepped forward and took the horse’s tail but his friend hissed no – not there, higher up you bloody doylem.
The man raised the scissors; he moved them right up to where the tail met the horse’s haunch and holding it there with one hand he hacked through the bunched hair. It was tougher than he thought so he hacked some more. When it did not give and the horse went to rear he paused a moment and then he moved the scissors further down and cut again and this time the thick hairs came away in strands. The horse stirred again and looked back over its shoulder, but it did not buck. Instead it repositioned its feet and looked on with mute indifference.
These shears—
Just get on with it.
He finally stepped away with the tail in hand and held it there before him as if it were a trophy: a legendary pike perhaps, or a leveret freed from a snare or a trapped fox ready to be tossed to a pack of baying terriers. He held it up to the candle and the light showed that the tail hairs were earthy brown in colour, running down to black where they fanned out at the tip. A ragged oversized hedgehog of hair remained on the horse’s rump.
Tie it, said the one holding the candle and his friend said what?
Tie it at the top end, he said again.
The man looped the tail. He encircled his fist with it.
He tied it round. Knotted the end.
Held it there again. Aloft. A trophy.
Deighton, he said.
That bastard, said the other.
I’ll nail it to his front door.
Aye. Just as was ordered. His scalp will be next.
In the dead of night the wind spun down the tight corridor of the hidden valley-within-a-valley that was Cragg Vale. It sprinted in across the open moors of Blackstone Edge and it screamed and shrieked when it found itself trapped between the steep sides of the shadowed vale that drew it deeper into the cleft of land.
Down through Turvin Clough it blew, and it whipped the waters of Elphin Brook into a fuming white foam then rose to the place where several houses huddled close together by a bridge and a marsh to form a hamlet. It pelted the black face of Cragg Hall with leaves and grit and shale. Rained down upon it. It shifted stones across the packhorse route and even flattened some headstones that marked the beds of the dead in the tiny cemetery. It blew metal buckets in noisy half circles. It tore rushes from the marshy grove and sent scarecrows on the seeded plots skywards, their matted straw stuffing spiralling from the collars and cuffs of old wool coats. It opened gates and then snapped them shut and took anything that was not tethered off into the darkness of the surrounding woods, where branches collected clothes and sacking and string and ribbons, and boots that had been left drying upturned on metal scrapers in stone porches.
Then just when the wind seemed as if it couldn’t get any louder the valley shaped the gust into a whistling twister; turned it into a spinning top that ate up the trees that grew densely packed in the narrow coppiced part of this fecund gulch above the village. It took trunks that had grown seventy and eighty years thick and pulled them up like carrots. It yanked tangled roots that had dug seventy or eighty feet deep into soil and tore them out in screaming wrenches. Roots that held amongst them boulders and warrens and setts and dens dug over generations by rabbits and badgers and foxes were now suddenly exposed to a whirlwind that sounded to them as if their very world was ending. Riven like rusted nails from warped wood, four dozen trees were snapped and felled in seconds. Others were split as if stricken by unseen axes that fell from the sky, and then they were upended so that they became distorted images of themselves, their roots now reaching skywards like arthritic fingers.
The storm howled once more and then it was over.
The spinning streak of violent wind had spun itself out, exhausted its dark centre into a nothingness, after which there followed only the creaking of timber and the shifting sound of small runs of mud sliding down the reshaped inclines before they slipped plopping into the stream that was now dammed in several places with the snarled entanglements of branches pressed down into the shallow waters by the weight of the thick trunks rent asunder above them.
The water swelled and by morning it was lapping over the banks and pooling in the lower clefts and channels of the newly-cleared leys that had opened up in woods that were once dense, but which now had greatly diminished overnight.
The roosting birds had already left a land they no longer recognised. Great gaps had opened up and what was once a maze of looming wooden columns that obscured any view from one side of the gully to the other was now a place of new spaces and chaotic uneven ground pitted with fresh holes that gaped like open mouths. A wrecked place. A ruined cathedral.
Then finally there was silence. A solemn, still silence.
At the Red Lion. In the barn out the back. The flat black back patch beyond the single street lamp’s reach – beyond the watching eyes of anyone who might chance to pass by.
Here the sharp sting of several types of smoke scented the air: the burned leaves of a bonfire, the greasy oil smoke of the hanging lanterns and the narrow plumes from clay pipes that clicked against black and broken teeth.
There was the stiff wet smoke too, ingrained in the wool and leather that the men appeared to wear as a second skin. And cutting through it all the pungent stench of chicken dung from the Red Lion’s own prizefighting bantams that were stuffed into their cells in a giant coop out the back, where they were kept mean and hungry.
In the centre sat a makeshift pit. Nothing more than a dug hole, circular, with three steps leading down into it and a sagging rope cordon to keep the men at bay. Only the landlord Piggy Ratchard and his boys – his setter-ons – were allowed down there to fix the spurs and remove the hoods and pick up the lifeless pecked carcasses of the weaker birds.
The pit edge was lined three-deep with men jostling to get a view as the hens were lifted aloft and odds were called.
There were sixteen cocks in the Welch Main contest, and the last one standing was to be declared the winner. It cost two guineas just to be there and much more to wager on a fight. Coins were being buffed and passed and checked and tossed. Pressed into palms in the half-darkness. Clipped coins and true coins, and the faces of the men that took them were halved and quartered by the falling shadow angles of the inn’s sharp corners.
There were familiar faces. Tom Clayton and John Tatham. The boy Jack Bentley. William Hailey and Joe Shay. Eli Hoyle. Eli Hill. William Hartley and William Hartley, the elder and younger. Isaac Hartley
and David Hartley. James Jagger. Others. Their arms draped around one another, their pint pots slopping. Coins being flipped. A song on their tongues.
It was a time of plenty and together they faced an incoming winter without the usual ache of wanting; this winter there would be logs and ale and meat and oats and coins left over for those rarest of things: luxuries.
One of Piggy Ratchard’s setters lifted a bantam aloft and turned in a circle. It was a meagre looking bird, and already scrap-scarred. More than once it had been bathed in Ratchard’s own piss, a practice he believed speeded the healing of the injured. Another was to suck the blood from a cock’s head wounds. This would not be this bird’s first fight but the odds being called suggested it would more than likely be its last. Another of Ratchard’s setters climbed down into the pit and paraded the opponent, making sure to keep its spiked spurs folded away beneath it. The two were then presented at close quarters, eye to eye.
At the back of the crowd Isaac Hartley rested one elbow on his brother’s shoulder and said to him: the river runs thick with gold still, my brother. It seems good fortune continues to shine down upon us.
In the pit, in a flurry of feathers, the frantic cocks were released and immediately tore into a clinch, spurred feet first, their heads drawn back.
Fortune or luck has little to do with it, said David Hartley.
Well then. It is good to enjoy the fruits of our endeavours nonetheless.
Isaac Hartley raised his drink and took a long swig. David Hartley said nothing. Around the pit the men jeered as the game birds reared and pecked then reared again. Beer swilled from their tankards onto the dirt floor. The two cocks became one rolling ball of tangled wings and falling feathers and the men cheered them on.
The brothers watched a while before the younger spoke.
They say they fixed the exciseman, the black devil Deighton, said Isaac Hartley.
David Hartley turned to him.
Who did?
A couple of the boys.
Fixed him how?
Just a little frightening.
A little frightening?
I don’t know. I believe they did tamper with his prize horse.
The Gallows Pole Page 17