by R J Lynch
‘Master, I can not believe that my brother is a murderer.’
‘If he is not, he was foolish to run.’
‘Will you raise a hue and cry?’
‘We are too busy to have men taken out of the fields to search for him. Especially as he took a fresh horse and could be many miles away. The Rector is a Justice of the Peace and I shall ask him to issue a warrant for Joseph’s arrest. To do less would be negligent.’
‘Will you send word to Carlisle?’
‘Why should I do that?’
‘Sir, if that is where he was when Margaret died...’
‘You are not listening to me, Tom. Your brother strangled his wife. That means that he was at home when she died. You cannot strangle someone at a distance. This whole story of being in Carlisle, and coming home to find his wife dead on the floor, is fabrication. What I am concerned about now is who to send as the new tenant at New Hope.’
‘But there are so many men thrown off the land.’
‘I did not mean I could think of no-one. I can think of too many. But I shall discuss that with His Lordship when we meet tomorrow. And now I must be off.’
Blakiston was prepared for awkwardness when he entered the Rector’s study that evening. There was none. Thomas welcomed him at the front door with a smile and a handshake so warm that he had for a moment the appalling fear that a man might be about to hug him for the first time since he had been a toddling boy in frocks, but nothing so dreadfully un-English happened. Instead, Thomas led the way into his den and poured a large glass of Madeira wine for each of them.
‘James,’ he said. ‘I have behaved like the most utter fool. I beg your forgiveness.’
‘Let us speak of it no more. I have already forgotten it.’
‘I wish to call your banns on Sunday. And I want you to know that I look forward to welcoming your bride into my home.’
‘It will give me the greatest possible pleasure to bring her here. And now, may we speak of other things? For I confess I wish us to put that whole unhappy time behind us. You are a Justice of the Peace. Will you please issue a warrant for the arrest of Joseph Laws?’
‘Joseph Laws? I shall, of course, but my dear fellow, you must tell me the story.’
And Blakiston did, and Thomas issued the warrant, and then they went in to dinner with Lady Isabella. The soup was mushroom, there was trout, a pot roast of beef and a roast chicken, after which Isabella ate candied fruit while the Rector shared his inevitable cheese with Blakiston. Three bottles of claret were consumed by the two men. The conversation touched briefly on the murder of Margaret Laws but moved swiftly on to a topic much closer to Isabella’s heart when Blakiston asked how the new additions to the rectory were faring.
‘Alice and Miles,’ said Isabella. ‘You know, my husband did not want to take these poor little ones into our home.’
Thomas made no attempt to dispute this remark.
‘And I think he believed that I felt as I did only because I had lost the child I was carrying. And perhaps that was so. But those children have brought laughter into this house, and even Thomas has been seen to smile. Though not our new curate.’
‘He does not like children?’
‘He does not approve of these. Do you know what he said? “And I will not have mercy upon her children; for they be the children of whoredoms.”’
‘You are familiar with the Book of Hosea, James?’ asked the Rector.
Blakiston shook his head.
‘God told Hosea to marry a harlot.’
‘Good Lord.’
‘Which, of course, Mary Stone was, and Mary was the mother of Alice and Miles. In Hosea’s case, the harlot’s name was Gomer, and she bore Hosea a son. His name in English was God Sows. Then she bore him a daughter, and they named her Unloved, and then another son, who was probably not Hosea’s.’
‘Thomas, my dear friend. Is there a point to all this?’
‘There is, James, and it is that God loves Israel as a man loves his wife, but that Israel turned away from God, and you cannot do that without punishment. God is just, but He is exacting.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Lady Isabella. ‘Be that as it may, Mister Fawcett had better moderate his language when he speaks of those dear to me or he, too, might find himself facing a wrathful countenance. He certainly will not find himself invited to sit at this table.’
‘So, Thomas,’ said Blakiston. ‘You have softened towards Mary Stone’s children?’
‘The Poor Law shall not trample them as most orphans are trampled. They are not to be brother and sister to our daughter Catherine, but they will live here until they are old enough to look after themselves. They will learn to read and write and do their sums. Job King gave me an excellent lesson on that subject only yesterday. And they shall know what it is to eat a nourishing meal every day.’
‘And God will bless you for it, husband,’ said Isabella. ‘And now I shall leave you both to your wine. Mister Blakiston, it has been such a pleasure to see you again at our table. And next Sunday, we shall invite Mistress Spence and Job King to join us. Job King is clearly a good man, however mean his origins, and in Mistress Spence we have a woman of common sense who will give us good conversation.’
Blakiston stood. ‘The pleasure has been mine, Lady Isabella.’ Blakiston had never done anything so dreadfully foreign as to kiss a lady’s hand, but he bowed his head.
But Isabella had no sooner left the room than she was back. ‘You said that you had issued a warrant for the arrest of Joseph Laws, husband?’
‘I have, not three hours ago.’
‘Would that all of your wishes could be answered so quickly. The servants are full of the news. Joseph Laws was arrested this evening in Darlington. Jeffrey Drabble is on his way there now with three dragoons, to bring him home to face justice.’
Chapter 10
Next morning, Blakiston rode to the Durham County Gaol in Saddler Street where Joseph Laws was held. As usual when he made this journey he took care that his pistols were loaded and ready to hand, for the road past Dunston Banks where the bridge took it over the River Team before he could join the main road south was a notorious hiding place for footpads. The journey, however, passed without incident.
Blakiston knew the jail from the time when Mary Stone and Martin Wale had been taken from there to be hanged. He had felt then that the very stones were blackened by three and a half centuries of grief and degradation. The place had not improved. Of course, treating prisoners well would cost money and those who had money might think it better spent on more deserving causes. Nevertheless, pity engulfed Blakiston when the gaoler brought the prisoner into the small room where the overseer waited, for Joseph bore the marks of a fight. ‘Did you resist the dragoons, Laws?’
‘I am not such a fool.’ He touched the cuts around his blackened eye below which blood had dried in a knot that, taken with the jagged tears in his shirt, made him look like a captured pirate. ‘This was done here, by scoundrels wanting money.’
‘When did you eat last?’
‘Yesterday morning, at Chopwell Garth before I returned home. I have been left with no means of paying for food.’
Blakiston called the gaoler and gave him ten shillings. ‘One of these shillings is for you, to take care of the prisoner and see no harm befalls him. Send out for bread and cheese and a bumper of small beer. I want to see him properly fed every day, morning and night, and I shall require an accounting of the nine shillings each time I come. Before you feed him, bring a bowl of water, soap and a cloth.’
‘Soap! There’s no soap here, Overseer.’
‘Then buy some. And reserve it for this prisoner alone. So, Laws,’ he said when the gaoler had left on his errands, ‘let us have a clean breast of it. Why did you kill your wife?’
‘Sir, I did not.’
‘Don’t be a fool, man. What other reason could you have had for attacking me?’
But Joseph was not going to answer, and after he had made sure that the gaole
r had obeyed his instructions, and Joseph was washed and breakfasted, Blakiston rode away no wiser than when he had arrived.
When he reached Ryton, Blakiston went first to New Hope Farm where he found Jeffrey Drabble in the fields. ‘When you arrested Joseph Laws last night, did he give you any trouble?’
‘Trouble? No, Master.’
‘He went with you without a struggle?’
‘Quiet as a lamb, Master.’
‘Did he say anything on the journey?’
‘Yes, Master.’
When no more words came, Blakiston stared at the man. Was it possible that this innocent face hid a rebellious nature? Worse, was he being mocked? ‘Well? Out with it.’
‘Sir, he said he had not killed his wife. He said she deserved to die but he had not killed her.’
‘Deserved to die? Did he say why?’
‘No, Master. But I should think…’
‘Yes? What should you think?’
‘Master, the Rector did not like it when I…’
‘The Rector is not here to listen to you, Drabble. I am, and I should like to know what it is that you should think.’
‘Yes, Master. Well, Master, you know that Maggie Laws…I am sorry, I am to say Mistress Margaret…you know that she was with child.’
‘I do know that, Drabble. Yes.’
‘Well, Sir, Joseph Laws may wonder whether the child she was to have was his.’
‘Ah. Again this comes up. Why? Why are people so sure that Margaret Laws was carrying another man’s child?’
‘Sir. Margaret Laws was Walter Maughan’s daughter. His second daughter. Walter Maughan is a farmer on the Bishop’s land and he has three sons as well as Margaret and her sister. George is the eldest boy and he will take over the farm when his father is too old. Margaret was a flighty girl, Master. When she was just sixteen and not married she fell for a bairn.’
‘She married the father? But that could not have been the son she brought Joseph, for the boy is too young.’
‘She did not marry the father because she never said who he was.’
‘But she would have been questioned?’
‘No, Master. Walter Maughan was a church warden and an overseer of the poor and he would not see his own daughter brought before the others so he gave his bond that her child would never be a charge on the parish. There were those that smiled, for Walter is no friend to the poor. He guards parish money as his own. But the babe was stillborn and so his bond was not needed. Then when Margaret was twenty-two she fell again and this time Walter married her off to Ezekiel Patterson who farmed north of the Tyne, in Chollerford.’
‘Was he the father?’
‘It was said he was. But it was also said that Walter give him five hundred pound to take his daughter and her bastard child off his hands.’
‘Five hundred pounds? A fortune. Do you believe it?’
‘Sir, these things always grow in the telling. But I do believe he bought his daughter a husband, and his grandson a father.’
‘Perhaps I should ask him. Did you speak to the post boy?’
‘Yes, sir. He delivered a letter to New Hope Farm the day before yesterday.’
‘Delivered? Or did not deliver?’
‘Delivered, sir. He did deliver it.’
‘I see. I was not expecting that. I know it chimes with what Susannah Ward had to say, but still I did not expect it.’
‘Beg pardon, sir, but could we say something about the work I am to do here?’
‘It is harvest time and about to be busy. Let us meet tomorrow after breakfast at Chopwell Garth and we will discuss it together with Tom Laws.’
It was only as he rode to Chopwell Garth to tell Tom of this meeting that Blakiston wondered why Walter Maughan had not come to Ryton when he heard his daughter was dead, and when he did he also wondered why he had not wondered such an obvious thing earlier. He asked Tom whether Maughan had been informed.
‘Not by me, Master.’
‘’For goodness sake, Tom, I am soon to marry your sister-in-law. You cannot continue to call me Master. And now I see I have alarmed you. Did you always show so clearly on your face what was happening behind it?’
‘But, sir, what should I call you if not Master or Sir?’
‘Hmm. I see what you mean. What Kate will call me would not be right on your lips.’ If he had meant to raise a smile with Tom, he was disappointed. ‘You must call me nothing.’
‘Nothing, Master.’
‘Nothing. Not nothing, Master. So, when you said “Not by me, Master,” you will in future say, “Not by me.”
‘That will not be easy, sir.’
‘That will not be easy.’
‘I am sorry, sir. That will not be easy. I mean, I am sorry, that will not be easy.’
‘Try. Practice makes all things possible. In any case, you did not send word to Walter Maughan that his daughter had been murdered.’
‘I had no-one to send. And I did not think he would care.’
‘His own daughter?’
‘He had cut her from his life. He did not attend her wedding to Joseph.’
‘Is that so? Well, I must seek him out and learn what he has to say. If he feels that way I should like to know where he was when Margaret was killed. What can you tell me of him?’
‘Very little, save that he is a man of few friends.’
‘Because of his manner?’
‘Poor law overseers are not popular.’
‘But you are one yourself now.’
‘I am and I wish I were not. It is not farmers who set the payment rate for paupers and make it so small they go hungry. It is not farmers who decide that an old widow-woman must be removed to her place of settlement, a place she may not have seen since she came here as a young bride. It was not farmers who built the Woodside Poor House and said the poor must enter it or starve. But it is farmers who are made overseers of the poor and have to carry these things out on behalf of their betters, and farmers who get the blame. When a labourer has no work and must go to the mines or see his children sent as apprentices to some place from which they will likely never return, it is a farmer who has to tell him. Our people go off to the towns and the pit villages and they do not like it and they blame us.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘And when enclosure comes...’
‘...and it will come, as it has come everywhere...’
‘...people will see some farmers with big farms and many small men driven from the land. It will be the Bishop of Durham’s doing, and the Blacketts’ doing, and it is they who make money from enclosures but it is us the people see and us they blame. People have long memories. They remember not only their own grievances but those of their fathers and their grandfathers.’
‘I notice you are careful to blame the Bishop and the Blacketts but not your own landlord, Lord Ravenshead. Or me.’
Tom said nothing.
‘And that is the only reason Maughan is not liked?’
‘No, sir. I am sorry, I mean, No. In his case, people are right to blame the farmer. Walter Maughan is not a mean man but he is a terror with paupers. You know here before the Poor House the pauper’s allowance was three pound and eighteen shilling for a year. One shilling and sixpence – eighteen pence, Mister Blakiston – to feed and clothe themselves for a week.’
‘It is not much, Tom.’
‘It is less than not much; it is close to nothing at all. But Walter Maughan said the better off sort in the parish should not be asked to pay so much and he wanted to reduce the allowance to one shilling. Two pound twelve shilling in a whole year. Twelve pence for a week at a time when meat is ninepence a pound and you would pay three pence for a loaf of bread.’
‘But, Tom, the Law sets the allowances and they are more than that.’
‘That is no help to those who cannot pay a lawyer.’
‘Well, it is disgraceful.’
‘The Rector prevented him from carrying it through. But still, it is not possible to be a po
or law overseer and be liked by people and I wish I had not been elected. I will be glad when my term of office is over. Which is not something ever said by Walter Maughan, for he loves the work so much he takes the turn of others. Do you know, when Henry Foster died we removed his widow Mary and their two children. Just for the removal expenses and the cost of the hearing at the Sessions we paid eight pound, three shilling and five pence. For that we could have kept all three on the parish till the year after next, and kept the bairns where they know and are known instead of some place they never saw. And we could have gone on keeping them another three year after that, had we but asked Mary’s settlement parish to bear the cost of keeping them here instead of having to receive a woman they had no desire ever to see again and her two young ones. At the end of that time the children would have grown to working age and the woman likely remarried.’
‘Did you suggest it?’
‘I did. Walter Maughan said that is not how things are done. What he meant is that he would not pass up a chance to make more miserable lives that were already almost too hard to bear.’
It was with those words fresh in his mind that Blakiston rode to the fertile land beyond Bradley Fell where Walter Maughan farmed almost five hundred acres – a big farm by Durham standards. Maughan’s landlord was the Bishop of Durham and not Lord Ravenshead, so Blakiston had no authority there and was unsure how he would be received. He had seen the man at church but exchanged no words with him.
He need not have worried. Maughan was in the fields supervising the wheat harvest but when a boy brought word of a visitor he left his sons in charge and rode to the house. He came into the kitchen, a tall powerful man in a hurry, threw his three-cornered hat on the table, seized Blakiston by the elbow and hauled him to his feet. ‘Good God, man, have they left you in here? Come through to the parlour like the gentleman you are.’ He turned to the maid who hovered in the doorway. ‘Coffee for Mister Blakiston. And is there any of that fruit cake left?’ Then he looked at Blakiston. ‘Or would you rather take a glass of small beer, sir?’
The force of the entry and welcome had knocked Blakiston out of his normal calm. ‘Mister Maughan. You are kind, but this is not a social call.’