Ill Will

by Michael Stewart

  It was all God said this and God said that. And God made this and God made that. I always liked the story of the Garden of Eden. And I was pleased when I got that far. The story was familiar to me but it was good to reacquaint myself with its lesson. Though it was not the orthodox one. God lied to Adam and Eve. He said that if they ate the forbidden fruit then they would die. But the fruit was not poisonous and they did not die. In any case, God had made the tree and made the fruit. Then the serpent came along and talked to Eve. But the serpent did not lie because he said that if they ate the fruit they would know good and evil and the snake was right. They did learn good and evil when they ate the fruit. God lied. The devil told the truth. When they were cast out of Eden, I thought that this was for the best. Who would want to stay in Eden under the authority of a tyrant? I was on the side of the snake. For wasn’t the snake also a child of heaven?

  I recalled that day when we clambered down Duke Top, through the wooded clough past Cold Knoll, resting in the heather near Lower Slack.

  ‘What’s that?’ you whispered.

  I didn’t see it at first, so well hidden was it in the undergrowth, but as my eyes adjusted, I saw it, a viper’s nest, the mother with her babies underneath her belly. They were all curled around each other for warmth. The mother bobbed her head and flicked her tongue. She saw us watching her and coiled protectively around her brood. We sat and watched, as stiff as rocks, not wanting to disturb the scene. We hardly even dared to breathe. At last we crept away, leaving them alone again. There was something majestic about that creature and we had both been bewitched by her finery.

  And I read of Cain and Abel, of Cain slaying Abel, and I realised that Cain had acted in haste and could have punished his brother much worse by not killing him. In this way Abel escaped his true punishment. I was determined that Hindley would not escape his. On I read, it getting easier verse by verse and chapter by chapter. So that by the time I got to Exodus my reading was accomplished. I read all the culinary advice God offered Moses. I read the Lord’s commandments and vowed to disobey them all: I would steal, I would bear false witness, I would covet my neighbour’s oxen, and I would kill if I felt like it. But better to kill a man’s spirit, to crush it entirely, while saving his flesh for the devil.

  The Man with the Whip

  One morning towards the end of August, after I had finished my work in the stable, the farmer approached with a scythe and said he needed me to do some different work.

  ‘No time to stand there idle, lad. The hay needs cutting. I need to gather as many hands together in yonder hayfield.’

  He handed me the tool. I walked up to the hayfield where a small gathering of farm workers loitered. Men and women and children. We waited for Dan’s instructions, then we got to work. We grafted all day, me in shirtsleeves, swinging the scythe so that it cut the stalks, then catching up armfuls of moist, reeking grass, and tossing it out to the four winds. Each swathe of cut grass was shaken out with a fork, then turned and turned until it was as dry as a bone. From dawn till dusk, a file of servants and hirelings toiled in the field. Some of these hirelings were no older than bairns.

  There was a girl working beside me, with very pale blonde hair and striking grey eyes. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years of age and there were no signs yet of comeliness. She was dressed in a simple white frock and her feet were bare. She was surrounded by people and yet seemed all alone in that field. Like there was an invisible wall all around her. She looked at no one and spoke to no one. She grafted but never seemed to toil. When all the hay was cut, we gathered it in stacks, ready to be carted to the top barn. At the end of the day we went down into the yard and found places to sit, while the farmer’s wife served barley bread, cheese and ham, and the farmer rolled out three barrels of ale.

  ‘Will you partake?’ he asked the girl with the white-blonde hair, who was sitting on a bale of hay, eating her bread and cheese on her own.

  ‘I will not,’ she said, without looking up at the farmer.

  ‘Please yourself,’ the farmer said and went to the next worker.

  This made me smile. I went over to her and sat at the end of the bale.

  ‘Not a disciple of ale then, are we?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘And you’ve no thirst on after all that work?’

  She didn’t react or even look at me.

  ‘I know where there’s a stream nearabouts. And I know where there’s a well.’

  She grunted and stuffed a chunk of barley bread into her mouth.

  ‘I’m William Lee,’ I said.

  She nodded without looking up and without offering me her name. This also made me smile. I tried to engage her in conversation but she was having none of it, and when I’d finished my scran I got up and shuck the hay from my breeches.

  ‘Well, nice to meet you,’ I said. ‘Even though you’ve not much to say for yourself.’

  She just nodded.

  Young in years but old in temper, I thought and chuckled inwardly. I took myself to my den, where I read some more from the book. I read about the righteous Job, of which I’d heard many times from Joseph. He was fond of quoting from the book and fancied himself as a bit of a Job figure. The Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away. He called it the grandest thing ever written. But reading it for myself was a very different experience. I saw Job and God in a different light. I despised Job’s piety, and God’s malevolence. I saw in God a Hindley-like tyrant. God killed Job’s children and he didn’t even have the guts to do it himself. Instead, he got Satan to do it. At least Hindley had the balls to kick me in the face with his own boot.

  The next day, while mowing with my scythe, I saw Dick, the farmer’s son, in the field yonder. I had little to do with him, but even so, I had picked up that there was something wayward about him. Sticks had been right about that. I’d had one altercation with him a few days ago, when he had accused me of taking tobacco from his tin. When I pointed out that I didn’t smoke, he had just laughed and said that I could have taken the tobacco to sell to another man.

  ‘There’s money in shag, we all know that.’ I merely shrugged. But he had squared up to me and said, ‘I don’t like you, William Lee. I don’t like the way you carry off. Every gypsy I’ve ever known has been a liar and a thief.’

  I stared into his black eyes but there was no life there.

  I’d felt the heat of anger rise in my belly, but Sticks had been standing nearby and had signalled for me to leave it. I’d kept my mouth shut and wandered up to my den. Sticks was right. It wasn’t worth losing my work or my head over. I would just add him to my list. Beneath you and Hindley.

  Now here was this Dick fellow, making his way to where we were cutting hay. There was a file of us, grafting. It was late on, and although she’d kept up until now, the girl with the white-blonde hair had got behind. I saw Dick approach her.

  ‘You need to keep up,’ he said, ‘no place here for stragglers,’ and he pushed her.

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it isn’t fast enough,’ he said and pushed her harder. She fell over. Dick laughed.

  She stood up and brushed herself off, then she said something to him that I couldn’t make out. We’d all ceased working now and were watching this. Dick stopped laughing and his face went pale. The bones of his skull seemed to protrude more prominently. He was going to say something but seeing he had an audience, he marched off. As he walked past me, I heard him mutter under his breath, ‘I’ll teach her to curse.’ But there was no more incident after that and we worked on throughout the afternoon.

  Some of the workers sang songs to pass the time. Saucy and bawdy numbers in the main. Songs about drunken monks and tragic sisters, cruel brothers and comely shepherds’ daughters. I listened to a song about a farmer who, in paying off a compact with the devil, tries to rid himself of a shrewish wife. The man offers his wife gladly. But the woman proves too much for Old Nick and he returns her to the far
mer. There was another song about a young woman who gives up her true love for a wealthy landowner. She marries the landowner, who she doesn’t love, and lives an unhappy life. The man she really loves goes off to make his fortune, but perishes in the wilderness. At last the girl realises she needs to be with her sweetheart and she goes off to find him. Instead she finds his corpse. I wondered when you would come to your senses, Cathy, and realise what a fool you’d been.

  Although many of these songs were known to the other workers and through repetition of their verses became known to me, I did not join in. I had a voice that was hardly made for talking let alone singing. But listening to them made the work more bearable and I was thankful for them. Afterwards we downed tools and scoffed supper. I took hold of a flask of water and tucked it inside my coat, saving it for later. It was the end of the seventh week and I now had three pounds and ten shillings saved. I was almost there and was thinking about my departure and how this flask would come in useful for the journey. Just one more week, I said to myself. I would make my way west. To Manchester town.

  When the pipes and cards came out, I took my leave. I walked across the fields towards the wooded area where my bag of pennies was hidden. I groped in the hollow until I retrieved it. I took out the pennies from that evening’s sale and put them with the others. I counted up the new total. Three pound and eleven shillings. In fact, I could be on the road in just five more days. I’d been spending quite a lot of time there of an evening, listening to the evensong of titmouse, finch and warbler, catching sight of an owl from time to time, either at its plucking place or roosting in the trees. I was struck by its eyes, which were made of the same cold grey glass as those of the girl with the pale blonde hair. The haymaking was nearly over. Just the top field now left to reap. The farmer had talked of further work, bringing in the harvest, but I had almost saved up my pennies now and was nearly ready for the road. The big town beckoned.

  There was no showing from the owl, nor was there much evensong to soothe my ears, but the night still felt young and I was not tired. Nor was I in the mood for my usual book-learning. So I walked through the wood and onto the moor, past my makeshift den. The ground became tussocked and sopping. There were paths made by rabbits and foxes across the morass. I thought back to our moor, patterned with these types of paths. Some days we would follow them, me and you, Cathy, and they would stop dead. We used to say that those paths led to another place, beyond the physical world. A witching place from where you drew your magic. Past cottages, barns and turbary roads, turf and peat cuts healing over like scabs. Packhorse tracks, homesteads, landholdings. When all signs of human life vanished, that’s where we would stop and sit. Sometimes we’d watch fox cubs play or hares box. Other times, we’d lie back and look at the paintings in the sky that were far superior to those done by human hand and brush, for they were ever-changing from one thing to another. I’d see a castle, but you’d see a dragon’s eye. I would see the branch of a tree stretch into a withered arm, which would change again into a fish, then a bear. I’d point out the shape and try and get you to see what I could see, but you’d already spotted another thing of wonder and you were pointing it out to me: a rat, a bat, a frog, a fox.

  The sun was slipping down past the horizon and the sky was closing in. The grass had given way to heather and I could hear the grouse croak like old crones cackling. Wet green moss grew like a soft woollen blanket, leggy heather, bracken, moss and sedge. Tangled sphagnum. Cotton-grass and bilberry. It was a moor like our moor where we used to watch the hatching of the peewit, whaap and sea pie. I remembered the moor as the place we had lived in and by. To run away to the moor in the morning and remain there all day. The moor was our school and our refuge. It was a place of solace and a place of wonder. Finding the gamekeeper’s heap of dead crows, or his gibbet of weasels. Once we came across a stoat trap, with a stoat still in it, miraculously unharmed, and we let it go, watching it scurry through the grass. A morning chorus of uncountable larks, uncountable beauty. Watching glead soar and hawks hover. In winter, snowdrifts deep enough to blanket the bog. In summer, the white tufts of cotton-grass waving over the same marsh. Yellow gorse, red poppies, purple heather. Every moss, every flower, every tint and form, we two noted and enjoyed. Even the smallest waterfall or heather-stand was a world of joy. The moors were an eternity where life was boundless and our bliss was endless.

  No punishment could rob us of those moments. No braying deterred us. You plucked some white stalks of gorse and said they were bones. Our bones, whitened by the weather. We watched a puttock wheel in the mist and listened to the cackling moorcock flap through redding heather.

  I felt such a strong yearning for those days, when it was just you and me and the moor, Cathy, that I felt it as a physical pain. Why had you let Edgar come between us? What did he have that money couldn’t buy? I ached for you. It was a sharp pang in the middle of my breast. Sometimes the longing got so bad that I could hardly breathe. It felt as though a viper was coiled around my heart, squeezing the life out of me. And I couldn’t unclasp it. I was suffocating. I was drowning. I was choking. All I wanted in the world was you. Now you had left me, abandoned me, and for what? Gold and silver and trinkets that meant nothing to you. I wanted to scream out: No, please, don’t leave me. I cannot live without you. I wanted to tear myself in two. I lay on the ground, felt the tears sting and let the acrid water drip from my eyes.

  It was fully dark when I eventually came around. I made my way back to the farm by moonlight, dropping down from the moor on the other side. As I scuttled along the path in the silver light of the moon and the stars, I heard a distinct screaming. Not the screaming a vixen sometimes makes when she calls her mate or the long harsh screaming of a barn owl, but another sound. I thought for a moment that it was the screaming of a wild cat.

  I stopped and cocked my head, listening more intently. As I did, I realised that the sound could only be one thing: the piercing scream of a person in pain. I followed it and found myself outside the building where the hay was stored. There was candlelight leaking from a crack in the door. I placed my eye there and saw a peculiar scene. The girl with the white-blonde hair and grey eyes was standing in the middle of the room. There were two men: one was the farmer’s son, Dick Taylor, the other I did not recognise. He was stocky with a thick mop of yellow hair, like a corn rig. The farmer’s son had hold of the girl with one arm, and his other hand was over her mouth. The man with yellow hair was uncoiling a length of rope. He took out an axe and I saw the metal blade glint in the light of the tallow candle. He chopped two lengths of rope. The axe cut through the thick rope as though it were a single blade of grass. He took one length and tied it to a wooden pillar, then took hold of one of the girl’s arms. He tied the rope firm around her wrist. Then he took the second length and tied her other wrist to a wooden post on the far side of her. I could see the panic in the girl’s eyes.

  When she was firmly tied, the man who had hold of her stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth and tied another around her face, preventing her from screaming out. The man with yellow hair went to the back of the barn. I couldn’t see what he was doing but when he came back he had a black leather bull whip in one hand. The farmer’s son took out a knife and used it to cut the girl’s frock. He then tore it so that the entire length of her back was exposed. Then the man with yellow hair uncoiled the whip and cracked the air. He smiled at the farmer’s son.

  ‘Give it to me,’ Dick Taylor said.

  ‘Spoilsport.’

  The man with yellow hair handed over the whip to the farmer’s son. The farmer’s son put the knife on the ground. He cracked the whip himself a few times and smiled. Then he walked up to the girl, turned around and counted his strides back. On the sixth stride he stopped and turned to face her. He stood quite still for a moment, then cracked the whip across the girl’s flesh. She flinched in pain and her eyes bulged. Her skin split where the point of the whip sliced at the flesh and blood leaked out. I saw it pour from the wound
and felt a heat rise within. I thought about Hindley and the whip he had used on me. I knew how it could cut through flesh and I felt the girl’s pain as if it were my own. And then a kind of mania spiralled in my head. My thoughts were travelling upwards like a puttock in the sun, to be replaced by a cold, hard, black feeling.

  I shouldered the door and burst through. Both men turned around to face me. I picked up the axe from the ground and ran at the farmer’s son, who was still clutching the whip. He pulled the whip back and tried to crack it across my face, but as he did I lunged at him with the axe, grabbed for the whip, and chopped his hand clean off at the wrist. He screamed and blood gushed from the wound. I went for the other man but before I could get hold of him he ran out of the barn, closely followed by the bleeding farmer’s son. Then I was on my own with the girl. The severed hand was on the ground on top of some straw, twitching. It was still clutching the whip. I untied the girl and removed the handkerchiefs from her face and mouth.