Wishing that God may give you grace to take warning, and in time of this desperate affair, so I am,
Yours
Unknown
Well now yoov red it with your own eyes Har har don’t make me laff As if a Clipper could rite so well as this Everyone knows Clippers might be good with tongs an sheers an fyting an drinken beers an good at weaven and farmen an fucken but riten is not any of thur strengths eggsept perhaps for this grate poet me David Hartley as this dogument will surely testify.
An one other thynge no Coiner would ishyou a warnen of murder A true Coiner wud just do it and it’s no use asken for God’s grace nyethur God’s grace is beyond us all Espeshelly me
Oh I am tyred So bluddy tyred but how can a man sleep when he nose his days are numbad.
The hills beyond the hills shimmered in a haze that lightened each layer of landscape in colour and softened their shape. It was the clearest of days: so clear that when Grace Hartley stepped out of her door to feed the chickens and retrieve their eggs and clip kale for broth and check the snares around the vegetable patch, and give the dog his scraps and fresh water and then untether him, she saw a new world stretching way behind her usual horizon. The sky was perfectly blue and cloudless as if it were a mottled mirror reflecting the bluebells that now carpeted Bell Hole woods and turned them into a dream-like wonderland.
Soon it would be May and the sky was a doorway onto a new world that reached beyond the valley. Perspective extended and for the first time in a long time Grace Hartley did not feel the weight of the grey ceiling pushing down upon her, nor the need to wrap herself in blankets or dry herself by the fire, or turn her back to the moor.
She had not left the valley in a long time. Many months or more. The children had never gone beyond the old packhorse bridge a mile or so down through the woods in Mytholmroyd.
The ground was dry and the wild grasses that fringed the moor perfectly still. She straightened and stood with a bucket in one hand and egg basket in the other and she listened. She heard the shrill exchange of birds and then when they fell silent she heard nothing but endless space.
She thought of her husband. She thought of David Hartley in a cell, the man she would never see again unless his execution was stayed and two days away that was now unlikely.
His swinging body she would not see. A man of glory choked like a chicken – no. Such an image would haunt her for all days. She knew she would stay away.
She thought of her husban’ds brother, William Hartley the younger, now gone. Last witnessed fleeing to the moors like those scarecrows and dancing creatures that were part-deer and part-man that her husband had once drunkenly confided in her to having seen. She thought of their other brother Isaac Hartley, gone. Whereabouts unknown. Lynched and dead in the turnpike ditch for all she knew. She thought of their father, William the elder, as old as the hills, also gone. Last heard of in the Colne Valley four months since, when the snow was still on the ground.
She thought of all the other men, gone. Locked up and shipped out. Or in hiding, gone to ground, like cowardly creatures. Some, like the one they knew only as The Alchemist, was now little more than an apparition that stalked recent memory, nameless and faceless and so vague it was as if he never been there at all.
All that was left in their wake was the house and the children. The moor. No-one had been round since the arrests; no men had visited to pay respect or offer a tribute. They stayed away now. They were gone now. Invisible now. A full season she had spent with no-one but three children under the age of four: Mary, David and the little bawling baby Isaac, already the image of his father. Her husband had wanted to replicate his generation by siring a fourth that they would name William. His seed would spill no more now though.
Yes. A full season it was that had passed, of hungry mouths, soiled blankets and a frost that had lingered beyond Easter. And all with little to eat but that which she could produce or procure: oats, eggs, potatoes, bread. Breast milk.
She could not venture down the hill. Would not. No. Not with David facing the rope. Not with the valley crawling with the unfamiliar faces of new law enforcers and sheriff’s officers and bailiffs and well-dressed gentlemen and newspaper writers from places as far away as Rotherham and Hull and Newcastle, all here to see the hills that spawned the Cragg Vale Coiners; not, too, with the surveyors and labourers and mill men scattered across the hillsides with ropes and stakes and spyglasses and maps.
These men presented the biggest threat.
With the king of the Coiners deposed and his army defeated it was now open season in Calderdale. David Hartley had been wrong about many things but not this. Isaac Hartley too. The great hellish cathedrals of toil were indeed coming. There were new turnpikes and talk of a canal; new houses and furnace chimneys. New folk from beyond the valley – from beyond Yorkshire – were flooding their world.
No. With David facing the rope Grace Hartley would not face them. She would have him brought home. She would see him correctly buried in the soil of his birth. And then…
And then.
A voice echoed down the stone palisade. A lone cry of protest. It sang singularly for a few strained moments before another joined it. Then a third, to create a tuneless song of anger and excitement, of violence and a declaration of triumph too. More voices joined in; the voices of men, starved and shackled, chained and beaten. The voices of men unwell and illiterate and perverted and corrupted, all forming a chorus that reverberated around the bowels of the gaol. The voices were joined by a clattering of cups – hollow tin on cold stone. Then the soles of stout boots stamped the floor. They kicked at heavy doors, leather on wood, and they rattled at their chains, iron on flesh, and scraped their bait-boxes and clanged their bed-pots. Their stiff wool blankets were twisted and whipped and flayed, the straw beneath them scattered. The voices grew stronger, louder, more indignant, more furious. The entire building came alive with the noise of scraping and banging and howling and rattling and smashing and singing and shouting and braying and grinding and grating and crashing and clobbering and splintering and cleaving and burning and wresting and splashing and beating and clawing and shredding and shouting and splitting and screaming.
It was the strangest of eulogies for a person not yet dead; a symphony of destruction for a condemned man played by an orchestra of stone and bone and meat and metal and fists and feet and blood. That man was David Hartley and in the morning that man would hang.
Close to the banks of the River Calder the wives of William Clayton, Thomas Spencer, John Wilcox and Jonas Eastwood met to gather in the nettles. The virulent plants had come up thick this spring and were already swaying at waist height. The women pulled up their dresses and tied their coats and waded into the thick patches. Here by the waters on the dirt path trampled smooth, the weeds grew deepest. Each woman had a practised way of clasping and twisting the leaves away without getting stung, and within a minutes their baskets were brimming with large ash-green leaves, the fine barbed hairs of their stalks glinting in the late April early morning sunshine.
They picked sorrel too, and garlic leaves.
Nearby, the copper water edged noisily over shale and river stone down to a slow-flowing pool that sat beneath a tangled overhang of tree roots where occasionally a fish rose to gulp at a fly that had settled on its surface. Once or twice they leapt, twisting like brilliant spindles. Glinting like something forged and buffed.
The women did not speak of their husbands.
To speak of them was not the thing to be done when they were all locked away awaiting their outcomes. That these men would have been beaten, maltreated and starved was a given. In time perhaps some of their husbands would be released, others gaoled under lengthy sentences. Some could be sent away or, worse, transported to overseas penal colonies never to be seen again, and perhaps some would yet swing.
And didn’t they have enough weighing on their minds, with mouths to feed
and the memories of the previous year or two of an abundance of food and drink, and money for clothes and housekeeping, and even gifts from their men already fading? The coining had given them that. The yellow trade had offered them a glimpse of better times.
But now the guineas and pennies and moidores were gone – or hidden or buried or stashed or stolen or spent – and the days of coining in the Upper Calder Valley were few. Only one man had truly done it well enough and his true name went unknown. The Alchemist. His whereabouts, also, were unknown.
No. To talk of their men now would be to tempt fate and to admit their fears and loneliness.
Instead the four women took to the little inlet shore of the river where they crouched and brushed their nettle stems through the water. They dipped their baskets and lifted them dripping. Swilled them. Cleaned the leaves in the rusted runs.
They walked slowly back to Mytholmroyd speaking only of the weather and what the summer might bring. At the wooden bridge they parted ways with strained smiles, each heading to homes where the nettles would be chopped and mixed with oatmeal and onion, with the sorrel and garlic leaves, and then the mix shaped into clumps and dropped into a pan of bacon fat if there was any, but of course there wasn’t, so a finger of lard would be used instead. These pudding slices would feed their families for days, and until their men were freed to earn once again they would carry on living off nettles and sorrel and dock and oats and eggs, and each night they prayed in silence that their husbands might be spared, and that one day the valley would flow with gold again, and better days may yet return.
It was a bright morning. Clear. The sun streamed into the yard and even in their stone dungeons the men of York Castle could hear birdsong and smell summer on the breeze. They heard too the carillon of the city’s bells, a reminder that life was going on close by just through the castle’s entrance, over which there sat an escutcheon featuring crossed swords and a motto in Latin that none of them would or could ever hope to read.
They were two days off May Day, and though imprisonment had robbed them of the seasonal signs and prompts that were the mechanics of these countrymen’s internal calenders, history had nevertheless shaped them to feel the annual upsurge in seasonal energy.
In his room David Hartley paced. He wished his head had never once hit a cushion or pillow in his life and that he had savoured every waking moment instead of spending all those hours prostrate in a dream-state. Time was a commodity now, more coveted than any gold coin.
He wished too that he had used those extra hours to make more coins, gain more power, and to have built a great big wall around the valley flanks to keep out incomers.
He also wished he thrown more fucks his wife’s way than he had. He wished he had spawned ten children. A hundred children. He wished for many things.
The castle was strangely silent, but from the streets of York he could hear the thrum and chatter of a city unsettled. It sounded busier than usual out there and the cadence of their combined voices was one of nervous excitement.
He paced, then he bent and ripped up the sacking of his bed and he flung it to one side and then he grabbed fistfuls of the straw and he stuffed it into the open drain, blocking it.
David Hartley looked around the room but there was nothing else but his roll of papers and the stub of pencil within it, the bait box that his meals were served in and his tin cup which he flung against the wall, and then stamped with his foot until it was nearly flat. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. He crouched and placed it underfoot again and bent and folded it over into a triangular shape, then began frantically scraping the narrowed end of it on the floor. He had never needed a weapon before in here; his reputation had been enough.
He was furiously scraping and sharpening the useless shards of tin when the door was unlocked and the turnkey Charles Claxton stood there flanked by several men.
You’ll not be needing that now King David Hartley, he said.
David Hartley noted the mark of respect by which the gaoler had addressed him.
I’ll go down fighting.
It’s not worth it Hartley, so put it down.
Or what will happen?
He clenched his fists.
You can either cast that thing aside or we’ll rush you and beat you senseless, then you’ll be dragged to your end bleeding and wearing the torn clothes of a broken man. You don’t want to look like a broken man, do you now?
Before David Hartley could answer Charles Claxton continued: because a man who is called a king should at least walk to his death with grace and dignity.
There’s no dignity in what it is you’re doing, said David Hartley.
That’s a fair judgement but why go out looking like a pauper?
David Hartley slowly stood.
You can go out your own way, said Charles Claxton. Dick Turpin did it with dignity.
How would you know? Turpin were thirty year ago.
David Hartley threw down the piece of tin nonetheless.
There were plenty of witnesses. And I tell you what else: there’s even more for you out there today. More than Turpin if the old-timers’ stories are to be believed.
David Hartley looked at him. He stood taller. Blinked.
For me?
Yes. For you. There’s bloody hundreds of folk out there to see the king of the Coiners and I’d wager there’ll be hundreds more waiting for you when you’re taken back home over the moors. Thousands. It’s like fucking feast day. There’s folk making good money selling chestnuts and beef water out there.
David Hartley stood for a moment, breathing slowly. By his side he unclenched his fists.
Then it is time, he said. The people shall feast.
He went to leave but he stopped and turned. He reached for his roll of papers. He picked them up and thrust them towards Charles Claxton.
You will keep the promise of my final request?
Yes, said Charles Claxton. I will see the safe delivery of your papers to your wife.
Grant me that, said David Hartley.
It is granted.
Faces were at the bars of the cells. David Hartley saw eyes blinking in the darkness. Arms dangled or fingers curled around cold metal bars as he was brought up from the stuffy stone corridor.
In the yard he was lifted up onto the cart. Hands grabbed him and hoisted him. His hands were tied. Fresh air flooded him.
A coffin fit for a king, someone shouted from one of the cells. Farewell to the true king of the northlands.
David Hartley nodded and lifted his bound hands. Raised a thumb.
Clip a coin and fuck the crown, shouted another, though after the previous night’s catharsis the voices were muted now. The inevitability of the death act was on the minds of all the felons.
Only then did he see the coffin laid behind him: an unadorned rectangular box of the cheapest construction. Open and ready. His home for eternity. Waiting.
Gaolers joined him on the cart, the reins were yanked and they left for Tyburn.
In past days it could have been to other gallows in other York parishes that he might have been led. Burton Stone Lane perhaps. Or that area known as Horsefair, down at the junction of Haxby Road and Wigginton Road. Fossgate. There used to be gallows at Garrow Hill too.
But today it was towards the most famous that they turned.
They passed beneath the arches of the gateway and David Hartley was into the city streets for the first time in nearly half a year. Already there were folk waiting and watching. Even here. Just standing and staring, saying nothing. Young and old, visibly rich and odourously poor. Side by side they stood to see the last journey of a doomed man.
The cart rocked and David Hartley nodded to those who dared to meet his eye.
They crossed the Ouse by the the only bridge to connect the two sides of the city. David Hartley looked down into the flo
wing waters and wondered if he could make the leap from the cart across the railings and down into the water, fifty feet or so below, and then he considered whether death by drowning was worse than hanging, and then they had crossed the bridge onto Ousegate and were heading up the slope of Micklegate, and it was too late for a watery ending.
Micklegate Bar led to Blossom Street.
Blossom Street to The Mount.
He knew the route. He had done the journey every night in his mind for weeks. He had walked the city streets and he had followed his footpaths of the Calder Valley too. Each night he had revisited his favourite places: the moor-top hollows and the wooded slopes above Cragg Vale. The vegetable garden at Bell House and the view from Daisy Bank over to Hebden Bridge. He had walked the length of Heights track and scaled Scout Rocks. He had lain in the bluebells with Grace.
He had seen the stagmen dance again.
And each morning when he awoke to the stench of hundreds of men, he felt a sliding feeling somewhere deep inside of him; a scream of abject horror contained by his ribs and flesh and organs. In was death within him, seeding there. It was rooted.
Many people lined the way. In places the crowds stood five deep. Some shouted his name and waved, and to these David Hartley signalled back, while others stared in silence.
They left the city walls behind them as the cart creaked towards the open land of the Knavesmire and the Tyburn gallows. David Hartley tried to steady his breathing. As he did so the gaoler next to him turned and spoke.
Hundreds have hung here before you David Hartley, he said.
He said nothing in reply.
And hundreds more will follow no doubt.
Without looking at him David Hartley spoke.
You have a mouth as baggy as an old nag’s goit.
Perhaps. But it’s a mouth that won’t be gasping its last any time soon.
David Hartley sneered.
At The Mount the turnpike turned into Tadcaster Road and they moved along it now. The green expanse of the Knavesmire opened up to their left.
The Gallows Pole Page 29