Lady Fairbrother’s maid had been sent to the cottage to demand that Anne accompany her to Norton Manor immediately. It seemed a new gown was required and Anne – having been Lady Fairbrother’s maid for some years and knowing her tastes and preferences – was to have the making of it.
Leaving Caleb to mind Dorcas, Anne went to the manor and some time later returned with a bolt of scarlet brocade, several yards of ribbons, a vast quantity of French lace and a small amount of money to pay for their labour. She brought, too, a gown whose style they were to copy.
“We must begin at once,” Anne said, taking the captain’s coat that Caleb had been close to finishing from his hands. “She wants the gown delivered before the end of September.”
“Can she not wait her turn?” Caleb asked irritably. The arrogance of these people was unbearable!
“Her husband is our landlord,” was Anne’s only reply.
And so they began. As their work on the gown proceeded the weather turned, the heated air cooling, the sea breezes bringing a damp, foreboding chill into every corner of the cottage, whispering of a long winter to come. Caleb’s fingers were stiff and clumsy with cold at the start and close of each day, slowing him down. Besides which the nights were drawing in and they had fewer hours of light to sew by.
It was an intricate, wearying commission, but they were glad to have work. Gladder still when they learned of a second event that was of great significance to the whole of Fishpool.
The village went to sleep on the evening of Wednesday 2nd September and woke on the morning of Thursday 14th, yet this was no enchanted sleep or supernatural occurrence. A year earlier an Act of Parliament had decreed that England’s calendar must be synchronized with those of other nations. In order to do so eleven full days must be struck from the year. Drinking coffee in Porlock’s, Pa had explained the matter of the Gregorian and Julian calendar in great detail but Caleb had paid little attention. It involved politicians. Foreign nations. Who cared about numbering the days? It could make no difference to him and Pa.
He had given it no further thought at all until Letty returned from Tawpuddle with a rumour that William Benson would be collecting rent for the whole month of September as usual. No concession was to be made for the changing calendar. Every tenant had lost eleven days of work and consequently eleven days of pay, but Sir Robert would not lose eleven days of rent.
The news made Anne dizzy with panic. “How can we manage? We will be turned out!”
“It can’t be true!” Caleb scoffed. “No man could be so unfair.”
“Go ask Benson yourself,” said Letty. “I just saw him. He’s down along the end of the village.”
Her jaw came jutting forward. They were the first words she’d spoken to him in weeks. Was this a challenge? Did she think he was too much of a coward to confront Benson himself? Well, he’d show her he wasn’t afraid. Despite Anne’s plea that he would let the matter lie Caleb left the house with Letty at his heels.
The steward was supervising the unloading of a small boat. Bales of wool, Caleb noticed. An odd cargo for a fishing vessel but that wasn’t his concern. When he mentioned the rumour, Benson confirmed Sir Robert’s orders. “The full amount, due on rent day, same as usual.”
“But this was not meant to happen!” said Caleb. “Parliament decided—”
“Parliament?” With exaggerated slowness Benson turned and looked at him with feigned ignorance. In thick, yokel tones he asked, “Where’s that to, then?”
“London,” said Caleb.
“Oh. London. Near three hundred miles away. Terrible long walk, so I’ve heard.”
Caleb felt every ounce of Benson’s mockery but with Letty standing behind him he could not let the matter rest. “My father said Parliament promised that the common folk would not suffer…”
“Did he now?” Benson rubbed his cheek thoughtfully and appeared to consider. Then he asked, “Was that before or after he took to thieving?”
Caleb’s hands clenched. He could wipe the smirk off Benson’s face. Two blows, one either side. The man’s head would be ringing for days.
But what would follow? Eviction? Arrest? How distressed Anne would be. She was fragile at the best of times and had he not already brought her trouble enough? Finger by finger Caleb unclenched his hands. As he did so Benson’s smile grew broader.
“Word of advice, boy…” The steward leaned towards him until his face was an inch from Caleb’s. Raising his voice so that the men who were unloading the boat could hear, Benson said, “If you want to keep a roof over that miserable hide of yours, you keep your head down and your mouth shut. And you pay your rent when it’s due, the same as everyone else.”
Flecks of his spittle hit Caleb’s cheeks. The man was vile. Wiping his face, Caleb turned on his heel, almost knocking Letty sideways as he stormed away down the street. She ran to catch up with him.
“Parliament would not want their wishes thwarted,” he raged.
Letty laughed bitterly. “You think them in London give a damn about the likes of us?”
He stopped. Looked at her. Caleb knew that she was talking sense, but anger had him in its grip. “He cannot get away with this! Is there no one we can tell? The Member of Parliament, perhaps?” He knew the suggestion was absurd even as the words left his mouth. He’d heard men talking about politics often enough in Porlock’s. Hadn’t Pa declared that government was run by the rich, for the rich? That as far as Westminster was concerned the common folk could go hang? Letty was shaking her head, looking at him with pity. She thought he was an idiot! And she was right. Tackling Benson had been the act of a complete simpleton.
“We’ve got a Member of Parliament around here, true enough,” Letty said. Her mouth twisted into an angry grimace. “But there’s only seven men in the borough entitled to vote for him. And I’ll bet you can guess whose tenants they are.”
“Sir Robert Fairbrother’s?”
She nodded. “And they won’t say a word to displease him. So we’d best get working, hadn’t we?”
They worked. Letty was out all the hours of daylight, knocking on doors, taking washing from whoever would give any to her, gathering wood, boiling the copper, scrubbing and wringing until her hands were red and raw. Anne sewed until her fingers bled, Caleb alongside her, stitching rage and loathing into every seam. To be counted a man and yet be so utterly powerless! His helplessness was like a bitter poison that spread through his veins day by day.
By labouring every daylight hour and by starving themselves enough money was saved. When rent day came Benson strutted along Fishpool’s single street, rapping loudly on doors, yelling the names and amounts owing. As their jar of hard-earned coins was poured into his hands, it seemed to Caleb that the steward took an obscene delight in his work. He counted every last farthing, noting it down in his pocketbook before stowing the coins away in a large casket.
They were safe for this month at least, but before the day was done they heard that two families in Fishpool had been turned out of their houses: one whose father had been lost at sea, the second where four of the children had sickened and died and the parents been too maddened with grieving to care to work or eat.
A sad, sorry picture they made as they trailed out of the village to who-knew-where, their meagre belongings tied in one small bundle. Anne could not bear to watch or even to bid them farewell but sat inside, Dorcas clutched tightly in her arms, weeping softly.
“He is a monster,” Caleb said, as he and Letty stood in the street, watching Benson urging the evicted families to make haste, to hurry, to shift themselves and get gone from Sir Robert’s property.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” said Letty. “He’s following orders. I’d say he’s more of a lapdog, dancing on his hind legs to please his master.”
“He relishes it. The man is contemptible.”
“He is that.”
The scene was grim. Miserable.
And yet here at least was something that Letty and he could agree on.
<
br /> 9.
The onset of winter brought storms: rain that pounded on the roof, salt wind that rattled the shutters and knived into every nook and cranny. Inch by inch the countryside died. Days shortened. Nights became interminable. Sleeping, Caleb was tormented by vivid dreams of Pa, chained in the hold of a ship that heaved in dreadful storms on the wild sea. Pa, sick to the stomach, lying in his own filth, calling Caleb’s name. Screaming. Weeping.
But one night in November there was a strange reversal and what filled his unconscious mind was not the bleak present, but the warm, golden past. Caleb’s dream was full of colour, of sound, of sweet smells and summer sunshine.
He was small – five or six – and he and Pa were in a water meadow, thick with flowers, by the winding river. Pa was trying to teach him his letters, but Caleb was making little headway. He could make no sense of the strange symbols Pa had scratched with a stick in the gravel at the water’s edge. His head ached with the effort and he was on the verge of bursting into tears of angry frustration.
But then the sunlight caught Pa’s signet ring. It glinted, dazzling his eyes, and at that moment Caleb recognized the letters that were engraved at its centre. He had always thought the design was of two interlocking horseshoes, but now he saw it was two letter Cs, back to back. They were the initials of Pa’s father, Charles Chappell, but at five years old Caleb didn’t know that. He knew only that those shapes suddenly made sense.
Grinning he took Pa’s hand, pointing – “That is a C,” he declared. “C is for Caleb.”
Pa had hugged him tight, telling him he was proud, proud to have such a son. What man could wish for more? “C is for clever too. Clever lad!”
In the morning he woke not in a fevered sweat, but in a warm glow of contentment. He could feel Pa’s presence. It was as if his father was there with him still, that Caleb would only have to open his eyes to see Pa’s smiling face. That sense did not leave him when he rose, but wrapped itself around him like a cloak when he left the house at first light.
High water had been an hour before dawn. Letty had developed a racking cough so Anne sent Caleb in her place to see what had washed up overnight. Driftwood for the fire, she hoped, plenty of it. The more wood Caleb could find, the more tolerable the coming winter would be.
He walked along the marshy shore where the river spewed its contents into the sea. It was a leaden grey, bitter morning, the chill air pierced by the shrieks of seabirds. The souls of lost sailors, Letty called them, and it had the ring of truth to it. There was something in those cries that smacked of grief.
Far out to sea, totally obscuring the island in the bay, clouds squatted heavy on the horizon, big-bellied, big-arsed, angry bruise-black.
And then came a sudden shift of light. Through a gap between the clouds the rising sun sent slanting beams across the water. The sea turned deep blue against the dark sky, the sand russet and copper and gold, the marsh grass emerald-green. A squall of wind blew an icy shower over the water and then a rainbow was arcing over the bay from one headland to the other. There was an awful, raw beauty to the scene that made Caleb draw in a sharp breath.
He stopped near the sandbanks that humped across the river’s mouth forming a bar at low tide that ships couldn’t cross. It was like a line of beached whales, Letty said, although as he’d never seen a whale and couldn’t imagine a creature so vast he didn’t know whether her comparison was a true one or not. But he’d lived long enough at his aunt’s to know that after a high tide the flats near the sandbanks were strewn with debris. Flotsam and jetsam drifted in massed hordes. Clumped seaweed, branches, sometimes – after a flood – what seemed like whole forests of uprooted trees.
But today, the sea had given up nothing. Nothing at all. Indeed it was strangely calm, the waves barely breaking although it was clear that a storm was on its way. The marsh flats were washed clean, with no trace of anything laid down by the tide. Caleb skirted the dunes and looked along the beach where the wet sand reflected the sky so it was hard to tell one from the other.
The beach was as empty as the flats. There was just one thing. A dark shape in the water, rising and falling in the slight swell. The moment he saw it he knew it was a corpse.
A man. Drowned. Dead. No doubt about it.
A cold hard lump formed in Caleb’s belly. He wanted to turn. Walk away. But the corpse couldn’t be left there. He was alone, so the task fell to him. He must wade in, drag the body onto the sand to stop the sea carrying it back out again.
His feet were like lumps of lead as he walked. The sand was waterlogged, and he sank ankle-deep, his sucking footprints filling with seawater, step by step. By the time he reached the body the tide had ebbed a little and it was no longer floating weightless, but lying heavy and sodden, waves breaking over its back.
It was face down, arms beneath its chest, hair slicked across the cheek and wound around its neck like a rope. A noose.
Caleb’s mind was frozen with shock. It took some minutes for him to realize that the body would need to be carried off the beach and given burial but he couldn’t manage the task single-handed.
Help. He needed help. But who could he go to? Who in this godforsaken place would help him? Letty? She was unwell. Anne? The sight of a dead man would reduce her to hysterics. Who then?
He was standing, wondering, when the seventh wave came. He’d heard people in Fishpool talking about the seventh wave. He’d thought them fools – who counts waves, for God’s sake?
But now one so much larger than those that had gone before hit Caleb, almost knocking him off his feet, soaking him from the waist down. It crashed over the drowned man, tugging him as it ebbed, pulling him onto his side.
One arm came up, a bloated hand, stiff fingers pointing at the rainbow, tracing its line across the sky.
A ring on the third finger. Glinting gold. Two C’s entwined.
Caleb’s legs gave way, crumpling like paper. He was on his knees in the water, heaving his guts onto the sand.
PART 2
1.
After Caleb’s retching had ceased he got to his feet and stood bent over with shock, arms wrapped across his stomach.
The corpse’s features were distorted. Bloated. Made unrecognizable by their immersion in the water.
But there was no mistaking the ring.
However much Caleb longed to be mistaken, however much he yearned for the truth to be different he knew that Pa was a man of his word. He’d kept his promise. He’d come back. But he’d come back dead.
Turning away from the body and the sea Caleb looked about him. Not a living soul in sight. Yet there – on the horizon – its squat tower poking just above the brow of the hill – was the church. Church. Graveyard. Parsonage. That was where he must go. Trembling, sobbing, gulping in air, he willed himself to move. He tried to go quickly but it was like running in a dream. The ground was soft as quicksand, his limbs were heavy as iron: each step was unutterably wearying. He could not catch his breath. He staggered, limped, hobbled.
He did not look back.
Even if he had, his eyes were so full of tears he would not have seen a man emerging from the cover of the dunes.
A man who now crossed the sand and squatted down beside the corpse.
2.
By the time Caleb reached the parsonage he was almost unable to stand. A maid coldly informed him that the parson was attending on Sir Robert Fairbrother at Norton Manor. His sobs of distress brought the parson’s wife to the door and, seeing his condition, she took him indoors and made him sit down in the parson’s study.
“I dreamed of him! Last night. And then I found him. On the beach. He’s dead. My pa! Dead! Oh God!” Saying the words aloud brought on another bout of sobbing and retching. Caleb tried to master himself but could not. All dignity, all self-respect had been left on the sand with Pa’s corpse. It was some time before he managed to tell the parson’s wife exactly what had happened. She paled so dreadfully that he thought her in danger of swooning like Anne, but
despite her mouse-like appearance it seemed she was made of sterner stuff. Although her voice shook as she gave instructions she did not faint away. Despatching one maid to find men to carry the body from the beach to the outhouse she then sent another girl running to fetch Anne. A third maid was ordered to the kitchen to make a posset of warmed cream, laced with brandy and egg, which the parson’s wife then pressed into Caleb’s hands.
It took an effort of will for him to drink it. His stomach was reluctant to hold anything but, sip by sip, he started to edge it down. He was only halfway through when the men arrived with Pa’s body. He could hear them outside, their boots scraping on the cobbles, voices raised, grumbling, arguing with each other.
“You ain’t taking your share of the weight.”
“I am.”
“You ain’t. You’re a lazy old bugger, you.”
“Where do we put ’un then?”
“Out here, she said.”
“Don’t bang him around like that!”
“He’s past caring now.”
“Ain’t you got no respect?”
So mundane. So ordinary. It was unreal, this couldn’t be happening – that wasn’t Pa being bumped and heaved and deposited in an outhouse as if he was no more than a sack of wheat.
It seemed an age before the sound of hooves outside announced the parson’s return.
His wife went out to meet him in the yard. Through the window Caleb watched him dismount. He could not hear their words but saw the parson frown and shake his head as she told him of the grim discovery. And then Anne, Dorcas and Letty arrived on foot with the maid. Their faces were strained, shocked. There was a muttered conversation in the yard after which all of them came into the study.
At the parson’s invitation Caleb related what had happened that morning. He was a little calmer now, his story less garbled, more coherent. There was a long silence when he finished the telling. He expected Anne to break down with grief as he had done and for the parson to utter words of sympathy. Wasn’t it a churchman’s duty to comfort the bereaved?
Hell and High Water Page 6