Ill Will

by Michael Stewart

  I left the barn and wandered some more, not tired enough to lie down on God’s cold earth. I walked down a tree-lined track, back into the village. As I did, I heard music in the distance, a cheerful jig, and, drawn to the noise as a moth is to a lantern, I tried to find its source. I wandered along cobbled roads and muck tracks until I came to a village hall. It was a large barn, painted white, with light pouring from its windows. The music was coming from inside. I walked around the back. There was a small leaded window and I peered in. There were lines of lanterns and a huge fireplace with a roaring fire. There was a long table laid with food and drink. There were people lined up dancing: men and women of all ages. The women wore colourful frocks and bonnets. The men wore smart breeches, bright waistcoats and fancy hats. The hall was decorated with brightly coloured ribbons. There was a fiddle player in a cocked hat, playing a frenetic tune. I watched the group dance and sing and sup flagons of ale. I watched them smile and laugh and talk excitedly. The men held their women in their arms and drew them close to their bodies. I felt sick at the sight of them.

  Then I saw a black, repulsive face staring back at me. Half-man, half-monster, just as Hindley said. My reflection in the glass pane. A black shadow of a man with not a friend in the world nor a bed to rest, barred from life’s feast. I wanted the night sky to swallow me up, to be dust. I could never be one of those people in there. My life would never be one of mead and merriment. Condemned to stand outside the party. Not like you, Cathy, with your fancy frocks and fancier friends. With your ribbons and curls and perfumes. I wandered back to the farm, crept into the animal barn, and lay down on the straw with the swine.

  Flesh for the Devil

  That night I dreamed we were on the moor; the heather was blooming, and you were teaching me the names of all the plants of the land: dog rose, gout weed, earth nut, fool’s parsley, goat’s beard, ox-tongue, snake weed. Your words were like a spell. I watched your lips form the sounds. I saw your tongue flit between your perfect teeth. Witches’ butter, bark rag, butcher’s broom, creeping Jenny, mandrake. We looked around at the open moorland, but it had all been hedged and fenced and walled. There were men, hundreds of them, burning the heather, digging ditches, breaking rocks. There were puritans, Baptists, Quakers, inventors, ironmasters, instrument-makers. Our place had been defiled. The flowers of the moor had been trampled on. The newborn leverets butchered. The mottled infant chicks of the peewit had been crushed underfoot. Guts in the mud. You were in the middle of the mob, a heckling throng, staring around. I held my hand out but I couldn’t reach you. You were lost to me.

  The next thing I was aware of was someone taking me by the shoulders.

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’

  I was in the barn with the swine, and a lump of a man with a bald head was shaking me roughly. He wore big black boots and a leather jerkin. He looked more like an ogre than a man. It was morning and light from the open barn door poured in.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

  I was too weak from sleep to fight the brute.

  ‘What do you think this is, a doss-house?’

  ‘I had nowhere to stay,’ I said.

  ‘That’s no excuse.’

  ‘I was tired,’ I said.

  ‘Get up and get out. This isn’t a hostel for gypsies.’

  ‘I’m no kettle-mender.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  I thought for a moment; I wracked my brains.

  ‘Come on then, lad, speak up. Have the hogs gobbled your tongue?’

  I remembered that young boy at chapel, Cathy, you were friendly with him. Died of consumption a few years since. I always liked his name. It was good and whole and clean.

  ‘My name, sir, is William Lee.’

  I’d stolen the name of a dead child. A boy we laiked with before and after sermon.

  ‘Well then, William, Will, Billy, that doesn’t sound gypsy to me, I give you that. What kind of work can you do?’

  ‘I can dig, build walls, tend fowl, tend swine. Any work you have.’

  ‘Are you of this parish?’

  ‘I’m an offcumden, sir, from the next parish.’

  ‘I do need hands, as it happens.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I’ve a wall that needs building. And stone that needs breaking. A bloke did a flit after a drunken brawl a few nights back. I’m a man down.’

  ‘I’m that man, sir. I’m a grafter.’

  ‘Sure you’re not a pikey?’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘I don’t employ gyppos.’

  He took me over three fields, two of meadow, one of pasture, to where there was a birch wood and a small quarry. As we stood by the delph I realised, in fact, that he wasn’t as large as I’d at first thought. Though still heavyset and big of bone, he was not the giant my waking eyes had taken him for.

  ‘This is where you get the stone. There’s a barrow there. Don’t over-fill it, mind. I don’t want it splitting.’

  He showed me where it had been parked for the night. Next to the barrow were several picks and wedges, as well as hammer and chisel. Then he walked me across to another field where a wall was partly constructed.

  ‘And this is the wall. In another hour or so there will be some men to join you. Some men to break stone and others to build. The one they call Sticks will tell you what to do.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘The name’s Dan Taylor. I own this farm.’

  With that the farmer walked back down to the farm buildings and I sat on a rock. I amused myself by pulling grass stalks from their skins and sucking on the ends. I gathered a fist of stones and aimed them at the barrow. I watched the tender trunks of the birch wrapped in white paper. A web of dark branches. The leaves and the catkins rustled in the breeze. I waited an hour or two before the first of the men arrived. He was skinny as a beanpole and his hair was dark. He had a bald patch to the side just above his ear, in the shape of a heart. His beard grew sparsely around his chops. He told me the farmer had spoken to him about me.

  ‘Well, William Lee, you do as you’re told and we’ll get along fine, laa. The name’s John Stanley. Everyone calls me Sticks.’

  He unfurled his arms the way a heron stretches out its wings and offered me his willowy hand to shake.

  We broke stone for a time before two more men appeared and joined us. When we were joined by another two men, Sticks put his pick down.

  ‘Right, men, we’re all here and there’s lots to do. Looks like the weather will hold out despite the clouds.’

  He pointed up. There were patches of blue but mostly the sky consisted of clouds the colour of a throstle’s egg. Not storm clouds though.

  ‘Good graftin’ weather,’ one of the men said.

  ‘This is William Lee. He’ll be working with us today. Me, William and Jethro will work here to begin. Jed, you barrow, and you two start walling. We’ll swap after a time. Come ’ed.’

  We set to work again.

  ‘You from round here then, laa?’ Sticks said as he loaded up a barrow with freshly broken stones.

  ‘The next parish. About thirty miles east.’

  ‘So what brings you to this parish then?’

  ‘I’m just drifting. No particular reason.’

  ‘People don’t just drift. They always have a purpose. You’re either travelling to somewhere or running away from someone. Which is it?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘Suit yourself. Give me a hand with this.’

  I helped him lift a large coping stone.

  ‘Had a southerner here last week. From Sheffield. Think he found us a bit uncouth. Only lasted two days. Could hardly tell a word he said, his accent was that strong.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you’re from round these parts yourself,’ I said.

  He had a strange accent and not a bit like a Calder one. He had a fast way of talking and a range of rising and falling tones that gave his speech a distinctive sound.

 
‘You travel around and you take your chances. I’ve done it myself. Got turned out of one village one time. The villagers threw stones at me and called me a foreigner. It’s getting harder and harder for the working man to make a living.’

  ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘Because a bunch of aristocrats are stealing the land beneath our feet. They’ll turn us all into cottars and squatters. Before you know it there won’t be any working men, just beggars and vagrants, thieves and highwaymen, prostitutes and parasites. Mark my words, laa.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘The days of farm work is coming to an end. They’ve got Jennies now across the land that can spin eighty times what a woman can spin on her tod. A lot of the labourers hereabouts have gone off over to Manchester, doing mill work, building canals. I’ve done canal work myself, built up the banks, worked on the puddling. Dug out the foundations. It’s back-breaking work, I’ll tell you that. It’s said that on the duke’s canal the boats can travel up to ten miles an hour. And not a highwayman to be seen. Done dock work as well, in Liverpool. That’s where I’m from, you see, laa.’

  I liked the way he pronounced ‘Liverpool’, lumping it up and dragging it out.

  I thought about where I had come from. All that I knew was that Mr Earnshaw found me on the streets of that same town. Perhaps I would go back there. Seek out my fortune in that place instead. I wasn’t fixed. No roots bound me to the spot. Where there was money to be made that’s where I was heading. Enough money to get you and Hindley. If I were to make the journey, I could use Sticks’s know-how.

  ‘I’m heading that way myself,’ I said.

  ‘Be careful how you go, laa. It’s not safe to walk the roads. A man’s liable to be picked up by a press gang or else kidnapped and sent to the plantations. They’re building big mills over in Manchester. But you won’t get me going there. Worse than the workhouse. Have you heard of the men of Tyre?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Pit men. They cut the winding ropes, smashed the engines and set fire to the coal.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To protest against their working conditions. It’s not natural to never see the sun. A pit is hell on earth. A mill is not much better. Folk call it progress. But there’s trouble brewing, mark my words.’

  ‘So what brings you here then? Why did you leave Liverpool?’

  ‘Oh, I travelled about. Done this and that. You know how it goes.’

  We worked on all morning with Sticks chelping in my ear. At lunchtime the farmer brought bread and ale. I asked for water.

  ‘What’s wrong with ale, lad?’

  I had no intention of turning into a Hindley.

  ‘Nothing, sir, I just prefer God’s water.’

  ‘Well, there’s a stream up yonder you can drink from. Or there’s the well in the yard.’

  After we’d eaten we swapped around. Me and Sticks set to work on the wall. Behind us was a birch wood and down the valley the farm and the outbuildings. We could see the thatched roofs from where we grafted. I shifted the stones into different sizes, heaping them into sets, saving the large uneven stones for the coping. I enjoyed the work even though it was slow going, like piecing together a puzzle. Each stone had to be carefully selected so that it sat just right with its mates. We started with the largest, heaviest stones, for the foundation of the wall, working up so that it got slimmer as we built. Every now and again we would strengthen it with through stones that hitched the two sides. We chose the flat side of the stones to face the wall, filling in the gap between the two sides with the odd-shaped smaller stones left behind, then the large, boulder-like ones as coping to top the wall and make it solid. The sun was up and the larks were singing way above our heads. So high in the sky I couldn’t actually see them. I saw a puttock being attacked by two crows and later the same crows attacked a glead that was twice their size. It’s just one battle after another, I thought. Even in these placid skies.

  ‘Had a problem with rats last week. The barn was overrun with them. Had to get the rat-catcher in with his dogs. Took him the best part of the day to flush them out and even then he didn’t get them all,’ said Sticks as he looked to place the stone in his hand.

  ‘Well, where there’s hens there’s rats,’ I said.

  ‘You’re right there.’

  ‘And where there’s swine there’s rats.’

  ‘True enough. Where there’s folks there’s rats,’ he said and laughed. ‘Seems, sometimes, folks and rats are the same thing.’

  We worked on in silence for a time, selecting the right stones, placing them, then finding a better stone for the job and starting again. For every three we laid we’d have to go back a stone. After we had built about half a yard, Sticks stopped working and took out his clay pipe. He sat on one of the stones and stuffed the bowl of the pipe with tobacco. He snapped off the end of the pipe and took out a striker and a brimstone match. He held the striker to the match until the sparks caught. Then he held the lighted match to the bowl. He puffed out smoke and smiled at his success.

  ‘What’s your vice then?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Do you play cards at all?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘We usually have a game after supper. Ace of hearts, faro, basset, hazard. What’s your preference?’

  On rainy days I’d played hazard with you plenty of times, Cathy. When the storms outside raged even too ferociously for our tastes. But the other games I’d never heard of.

  ‘I’ll probably sit this one out,’ I said.

  ‘No head for gambling, eh?’

  ‘Need to earn some money first.’

  ‘There’s a tavern up the road. There’s skittles and ring-thebull every night if that’s more your tipple.’

  ‘I’m not much of a player.’

  ‘There’s a cockfight at least once a week, sometimes a fistfight. If you’ve no taste for blood there’s always dancing.’

  ‘I’m not much of a dancer.’

  ‘Suit yourself. But if you work hard you’ve got to play hard. The one goes with the other,’ he said.

  He finished his pipe and put it in his pocket. We worked on all through the afternoon. By the end of the day we’d built up two yards of wall. We cleaned our tools with rags and stored them safe for the evening, then we traipsed down the hill for supper. Sarah, the farmer’s wife, served up oatmeal, bacon and potatoes. She was such a wee thing that I couldn’t help but picture her union with Dan Taylor and wince at the prospect. Like an ox on top of a stoat. The farmer rolled out a barrel of beer. He untapped it and poured the beer into large flagons. He handed them around.

  ‘Not for me, thanks.’

  ‘That’s half your wages.’

  ‘I don’t drink beer more than I need to slake my thirst.’

  ‘Ah, spirits more your choice?’

  ‘I don’t drink spirits.’

  ‘I’ll have his portion,’ Jethro said, a short, stocky man with red hair.

  ‘Well, don’t think I’ll be paying you otherwise,’ the farmer said.

  ‘Leave him be,’ said his wife. ‘Can I get you anything else?’

  ‘Water if you’ve got it, please.’

  ‘There’s buttermilk?’

  She fetched me an earthen pot of buttermilk.

  The farmer seemed pleased with my work and said that he would take me on. For all my labour I was to be paid five shillings a week and a gallon of beer a day. I would drink what I needed to slake my thirst and sell the rest to the other labourers at thruppence a pint. If I could sell four pints a day, that would be another shilling, doubling my wage to ten shilling a week.

  After I’d eaten I took a walk roundabouts. The farm consisted of a barn, a parlour, a dairy, peat-house, stables and mistal. There was also a chicken coop away from the buildings, with a fenced-in run where the birds could scrat. A dozen hens and a handsome cock. The window of the dairy had the word ‘Dairy’ carved into its lintel. I’d seen this before when we’d been out walking one time, Cat
hy. I remember you telling me that this was to ensure it would not be liable for the window tax. Another way the rich robbed from the poor.

  I walked up the lane. A mile from the farmhouse, there was a short turn by a clump of sycamore. The lane was narrow and next to this a church. It was a small, steep-roofed, stone building, with a few arched windows in a stone tower, rising scarcely above the sycamore tops, with an iron staff and vane on one corner. There was a small graveyard, enclosed by a hedge, and in the corner of this, but with three doors opening in front upon the lane, was a long crooked old cottage. On one of the stone thresholds, a peevish-looking woman was lounging, and before her, lying on the ground in the middle of the land, were two girls playing with a kitten. They stopped as I came near and rolled out of the way, while I passed by them. One of the girls laughed, and the other whispered and pointed. The woman said something in a sharp voice. I wondered what she’d said and who she was. I felt that in some way I was being judged. Though they seemed far from a position of authority.

  I wandered around the other side of the farm. Past the farmyard was another huge barn, a wagon-shed, the farmhouse, and the piggeries I’d ligged in the previous night. Close to was a mountain of manure that steamed and festered. The farmyard was divided by a wall, and milch cows were accommodated in the separate divisions. It was quite a place the farmer and his wife had. I wondered how he’d come by it. By hard graft or by cunning theft? Or by being born into it? Which is another kind of theft.

  I made my way back to the outbuilding where the men were at their leisure.

  Sticks asked me where I’d been. I told him about my perambulations and of the sharp-tongued woman.

  ‘That’s the wife of the farmer’s son,’ he said in hushed tones. ‘Be careful how you tread with the pair of them. She goes by the name of Mary and he goes by the name of Dick. I don’t know which is worse. I saw her crack a man’s skull open with a hemp-wheel last summer. He’s tapped different. He doesn’t lose it like she does. If he clobbered you over the head he wouldn’t raise his voice, or change his expression. There would be no sign of anger at all. Got to watch those ones, laa. The farmer’s no soft touch either. He’ll have you up at four o’clock in the morning and he’ll work you till dusk. You’ll earn every shilling, I’ll tell you that much. I’ve done all sorts in my time. At six years old I were a bird-scarer. I’ve been a gardener, land surveyor, bookkeeper for a brewery. Every type of manual labour. Doesn’t matter what you do, the master’s always got the upper hand.’