Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  For the next hour his feelings were those of chagrin and disappointment. He thought the court-room small and shabby and unimpressive, the royal arms above the judge’s throne in need of cleaning, and his own uncomfortable seat in a crowded balcony not at all commensurate with his position in the case; moreover the wigs and red gowns and miniver of the two judges, the bowings and puttings-on-and-cff of ceremonial hats, the readings of long unintelligble legal documents by wigged officials with wearied voices, seemed to him silly, unpractical, and sheer waste of time—that sort of thing might do very well for London, he thought contemptuously, but it wouldn’t go down in Yorkshire. At last, however, the opening preliminaries of the trial were over; the Judge appointed to the case was seated on his dais, the jury sworn; the three prisoners—they had been charged, and pleaded Not Guilty, on the preceding Saturday—were at the bar; the counsel on both sides having rustled their papers, whispered in each other’s ears, adjusted their rather dirty and fuzzy-looking wigs, smiled at their jokes and in general irritated Will almost beyond bearing, had settled into comparative silence; the actual business Will was there for could surely now begin. The Judge said rather testily: “Who prosecutes?” and one of the counsel for the Crown started up and opened the case; Will leaned forward eagerly.

  At first he was greatly disappointed, too, by the counsel’s speech, and thought him a noodle for wasting time in explaining such obvious facts (in Will’s eyes) as that Mr. Oldroyd at the time of his decease was forty-five years old, possessed of one son—here he rolled his eyes affectingly at Will, and everybody looked at him—and a cloth manufacturer of Marthwaite. Will also did not like to hear his father described as having expressed himself “with manly warmth” against the Luddites—“some may think his warmth imprudent,” said counsel, waving an elegant hand deprecatingly: “but I am not of that opinion.” (“Meaning that you are,” growled Will.) But as the speech went on Will changed his mind and began to admire this counsel very much indeed, for he saw that there was method in his exposition; first he sought to establish that someone had been killed, and that someone Mr. Oldroyd; next that the four croppers had a motive for killing Mr. Oldroyd and had conspired to do so, next that their movements on the evening of the crime were consistent with their having committed it, and not consistent with their not having committed it. The fellow was eloquent too, conceded Will. “If,” he was crying now to the jury: “If after hearing the evidence you have any reasonable doubt upon the case, for God’s sake acquit one or all of the prisoners. But if from the chain of evidence which I shall lay before you, you feel as convinced that these men have committed the murder as if you had seen them with your bodily eyes—and I shall hope so to convince you—then you will discharge your duty to God, your country and your conscience, by finding the prisoners guilty. And guilt must speedily be followed by punishment. He who sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”

  He folded his gown about him and sat down, and Will had to suppress a strong inclination to applaud. His body trembled and his teeth chattered with emotion. “That’s it, that’s it!” he murmured. “Poor father! That’s it! Murderers!”

  The prosecution now called its witnesses, and by the aid of the child who brought the fatal message, a Syke Mill man, who was the child’s father, Henry Brigg, Enoch Smith, the waggoner who took up Mr. Oldroyd’s wounded body, and the surgeon who attended him at the Red Lion, proved to their own satisfaction Mr. Oldroyd’s death as a result of pistol fire at the corner of Syke Mill Lane, and established a likelihood of premeditation from the child’s story of the message, the reception of which by Mr. Oldroyd the boy’s father had seen. There was a rather regrettable vagueness in the child’s evidence as to the number and identity of the men who had given him the message, and Will reflected with vexation that the child’s family was distantly connected by marriage with the Thorpes. Each of these witnesses were cross-examined by the defence on the point of the time of the occurrence in their evidence, and answered each according to his character—Enoch Smith sarcastically, Brigg foolishly, the child fearfully, the waggoner stupidly, and the Syke Mill man, this question not implicating Thorpe, with honest certainty: Mr. Oldroyd, he said, had looked at his watch a two-three minutes before the message came, grumbling because some of the men had not come back from their drinking. The counsel for the prosecution now re-examined the man “Was not Jonathan Bamforth one of those absent men?” he asked.

  Will had to think for a moment before he realised who Jonathan Bamforth was, and evidently the witness felt a similar perplexity, for he hesitated, and at length stammered: “Oh, Bamforth? Aye—he were one—and Mester Will,” he added. “It were them he were chiefly mad about.”

  When it was elucidated, by a question from the Judge, who “Mester Will” was, a slight titter arose at the prosecution’s expense, but Will perceived that a point had been made against Joe. His emotion deepened, and he glanced down swiftly to where Joe stood at the bar. Joe looked worn and sad, and his hair was quite grey, but he was the most composed of the three prisoners; Thorpe was always on the fidget, Mellor kept putting his hand to his brow, which glittered with sweat in spite of the bitter cold, but Joe stood quiet, looking at the Judge earnestly from his brown eyes.

  “He’s made up his mind beforehand that he’s going to be hanged,” thought Will shrewdly. “The other two haven’t, yet.” Did he want Joe to be hanged? Will swerved away from the question, as he swerved away from the thought of Mary whenever it entered his mind.

  The next witness called was Benjamin Walker.

  At the sound of this name Will sat up eagerly, and there was a stir of interest all over the court, which turned to a faint hissing and had to be reproved by the ushers, as the door at the side of the court opened and Walker was brought in. What did it feel like to betray your fellow-conspirators wondered Will, staring at the informer with all his eyes. At first sight Walker looked harmless enough; rather too sleek and fat, perhaps, with his vivid red lips and smooth black hair and flabby paunch, and his face not a face one liked particularly; but still one would hardly have judged him a wicked man from his appearance, reflected Will. But when Walker began to speak Will detested him; that thick lickerish voice, that self-satisfied smirk! How could the man seem so pleased with himself? How could he face his three erstwhile friends? Will looked down at the prisoners again; Mellor and Thorpe were gazing at Walker with such concentrated scorn and bitterness that Will felt had he been Walker he must have sunk under it; Joe, with folded arms, stared fixedly at the floor, as though he were too ashamed on Walker’s account to look anybody in the face.

  But presently Will forgot all this in the surpassing interest of Walker’s story. The meetings at the Moorcock, the croppers’ determination that frames should never be worked in the Ire Valley, their oaths, their resolution to smash the Oldroyds’ frames at the corner of Syke Mill Lane, their watches by the foundry, their reception of Joe’s false news about the coming of the frames—all this was so enthralling to him that he was quite indignant when the Judge observed to counsel in a peevish tone:

  “All this seems irrelevant, Mr. Topping. We haven’t heard any of the accused mentioned yet.”

  “Tell his lordship what connection the accused had with all this, witness,” urged the counsel. “Were they among those who watched the foundry?”

  “Oh, we were all in it, one time or another,” replied Walker cheerfully. “Mellor were t’leader, like.”

  A gasp went up from the crowded court, and the wretched Mellor put his hand to his head.

  “Go on, witness,” said Mr. Topping, triumphantly.

  Walker went on to the morning of the murder, when Thorpe, he said, had come to Wood’s shop in a desperate taking. Thorpe had been awake in the night, his little brother being ill, in fact dying; after he had died Thorpe had come out for a breath of fresh air, and just as he came up to the corner of Syke Mill Lane he heard a great noise along the road; he hid in the wood, and presently saw the frames, guarded by
soldiers, go by. When Mellor heard this, said Walker, he was very angry, mad with rage almost; he said it was a hard matter, and he had a good mind to take off Mr. Oldroyd; Thorpe said he would go with him to do it, gladly. Mellor said he had a pistol of his own which he carried with him, but Thorpe had better get one for himself, and he gave Thorpe money to do so. Thorpe went away, and came back in the afternoon with two pistols; Mellor then bade him go to Syke Mill and fetch Joe Bamforth.

  “Who is Joe Bamforth?” queried the Judge.

  “One of the accused, my lord,” replied counsel.

  “I thought Bamforth’s name was Jonathan,” said the Judge, turning over his papers.

  “It is; Joe’s just his short name, like,” said Walker.

  The Judge nodded his understanding, and Walker went on. While Thorpe was away Mellor loaded the pistols, very full, with powder and ball and slugs; he gave two of them to Walker to put into their coat-pockets, and then began to crop a piece of cloth. While he was busy with it Thorpe came in, bringing Bamforth. They all agreed that it was a hard matter about the frames, and that if once Mr. Oldroyd were taken off nobody else in the Ire Valley would dare to use frames; and Mellor commanded them—Thorpe, Bamforth and Walker—to go with him against Mr. Oldroyd. So they set off. Walker described their coats, their route, how the child bearing the message was already running down the lane when he and Bamforth reached the top; their argument in the road; how they got over the wall when they heard a horse’s hoofs; how Mr. Oldroyd came quickly up the lane. He, Walker, crouched down behind the wall so as not to be seen; the others, he thought, stood up; then there were three loud bangs and a cry.

  The audience gasped; Will ground his teeth and drove his nails into the palms of his hands. “Father!” he thought, “Poor father!”

  “What did you do then?” asked counsel in a hushed tone, as though even he were impressed by the awful magnitude of the admission.

  “We all ran away up the hill,” said Walker. “We were so fleyd over th’ job.”

  He then described how he and Joe had gone over the brow and down to Emsley, hiding the pistol by the way; how they had gone into the Emsley inn; how presently a man came in from Annotsfield with the news of the shooting; how Bamforth fell a-whistling; and a drunken collier danced. Later they both went to Wood’s shop by the Ire Bridge. Mellor and Thorpe and several other men were there. Mellor had his mother’s Bible with him, and he made them all swear never to reveal anything of the murder; then he gave Walker a paper, which he said was a copy of the oath they had just sworn; Bamforth, he said, had written it out. It was this paper which Walker had shown to Mr. Stancliffe when he went about the reward; he could not read and did not know what was in it. He had no further talk on the evening of the affair by the wall, about it; Mellor’s finger was tied up, so that he could not crop; his finger and Thorpe’s face had been all bloody, when they were in the plantation, with firing of the overloaded pistols.

  “This concludes this witness’s evidence, my lord,” said Mr. Topping.

  The eldest of the three counsel for the defence now rose, and subjected Walker to an extremely searching cross-examination. But, as Will soon realised triumphantly, all he got out of Walker were various fresh particulars which corroborated his previous evidence in the most damning fashion. Counsel tried to suggest, for example, that the pistol which Walker alleged he and Bamforth buried on Emsley Brow was entirely mythical, no such pistol had ever existed; Walker replied that Bamforth had told him that he himself, thinking its hiding place insecure, had taken away the pistol so that nobody should chance upon it, and had hidden it away in a bed in his own cottage at Scape Scar. (At this Will had a sensation of physical nausea: the court reeled before his eyes, and he feared he should vomit. A bed! The one he and Mary had lain together on, no doubt.) Counsel also tried to suggest that Walker had made up the whole story for the sake of the reward, but he only elicited some terribly significant details, all tending to show how anxious Mellor and Joe had been to keep the knowledge of the reward from their friends. One day in the autumn, meeting Bamforth by chance in Marthwaite, said Walker, he, Walker, had asked him what news there was of the war. Bamforth said quickly that he did not know, he never saw the paper now. Walker was surprised by this, for he knew from other Syke Mill men that young Mr. Oldroyd gave Bamforth the old newspaper every week when the new one came, Bamforth being a great reader. The very same day Mellor suggested that the pence each man in Wood’s shop subscribed weekly for a newspaper should be given to the Thorpes instead, as they were starving; and though there was some grumbling they did it for several weeks. Walker first heard of the reward from Mr. Brigg. Mr. Brigg was a lively gentleman, who often stopped on his way home from Annots-field market on a Tuesday to have a word with Mr. Wood. He talked rather loud, and one autumn day witness, being at the window, heard him tell Mr. Wood at the door that he was very disappointed that the reward had had no result as yet; for young Mr. Oldroyd would never settle down till the murderers were found. (At this Will blushed; Brigg and his marriageable Bessy!) Mr. Wood agreeing, Mr. Brigg said: He should have thought two thousand pounds would have brought one of the rats out of their holes, choose how. Mr. Brigg further said: It almost made him wish he was a cropper, to get the two thousand; he could do with it, and he reckoned Mr. Wood could, too. Mr. Wood said he never knew a Yorkshireman who couldn’t, and they laughed together. Witness, thinking over this talk and the matter of Bamforth and Mellor and the newspapers, felt certain that Bamforth had warned Mellor that there was a reward offered, printed in the newspapers; he made cautious enquiries at Annotsfield and found that he was right about the reward, and after thinking it over a few days longer, went to Mr. Stancliffe. The counsel for the defence sat down defeated.

  After the tremendous excitement of Walker’s story, the rest of the evidence for the prosecution fell rather flat, though Will was pleased that it dovetailed so neatly. Several other croppers confirmed Walker’s story of the pistols, the departure for the murder, the flight of four men up Emsley Brow, the return of Thorpe and Mellor with damaged cheek and hand, and the oath that evening; it seemed to Will indeed that half the Ire Valley were accessories before or after the fact. The only witness who added anything material to the story was a gaoler at the castle, who produced a dark green coat which he said he took from Mellor at the beginning of his imprisonment, and alleged to be bloodstained. The Judge declined to admit that this was relevant, but the gaoler went on to say that he had come upon a paper in the pocket of the coat, and reading it, found it to be a copy of an illegal oath; he then searched all the prisoners’ coats, and found no less than four copies of this oath in the pocket of Jonathan Bamforth. He had seen the copy of the oath given by Walker to Mr. Stancliffe, which he said Bamforth had written; the words were the same, and the writing was the same. The Judge again complained that this was not relevant to the indictment, but Will gasped; so Joe was a conspirator, a sworn Luddite, to that extent! The next witness’s evidence also concerned Joe; for she was the wife of the publican at Emsley; she remembered well the evening of Mr. Oldroyd’s death, she remembered well two young men, strangers, coming to the house and calling for food and drink. The news that Mr. Oldroyd was shot and like to die was brought in soon after the young men entered, and then one of the young men called for more ale, and began to whistle very much and well; there was a collier in the house, and the collier danced.

  So Joe had whistled to hear that Mr. Oldroyd was like to die, thought Will. God curse him!

  “That, my lord, is the case for the prosecution,” concluded Mr. Topping.

  He sat down. The tension of the court relaxed; there was a general stir and bustle; one or two spectators left the place, for it was long past noon; the counsel whispered among themselves and turned over papers. After a moment or two the Judge said in a loud clear tone which compelled everyone’s attention:

  “This is the time, prisoners, to make your defence. Would you, George Mellor, Thomas Thorpe and Jonathan Bamforth, wish
to say anything for yourselves?”

  There was a stir and mutter among the three men, then Mellor said hoarsely: “We leave it to our counsel.”

  Will expected to see one of the counsel for the defence get up and deliver a long speech, as Mr. Topping had for the prosecution, but there was no speech, only witnesses giving evidence. Will leaned forward and listened at first with the keenest interest, eager to hear what the murderers could find to say for themselves. But the defence was so meagre, so futile, that he soon leaned back and listened with indifference, certain that his vengeance would not escape him. He understood now why the defence had laid so much stress on the time of the various occurrences put in evidence, for they now tried to prove that none of the three accused could have been at the murder, because they were somewhere else at the time. Seven different men swore to have seen Mellor and Thorpe in Annotsfield round about six o’clock on the day of the murder; watchmakers, shoemakers, croppers, blacksmiths, Mellor and Thorpe seemed to have had business with them all. But it was so obvious to Will that the witnesses had mistaken the time of day that he could hardly refrain from shouting it out to the Judge. He began to be very curious as to what evidence Joe would bring, and whether Mary, or even himself, would figure in it. It would be rather awkward if Joe, for example, tried to allege as an excuse for the murder that Will had seduced his sister. Brigg—who alone among Will’s friends had been told of his betrothal to Mary, had always had his own opinion of it, and had gathered for himself, no doubt, that it was broken—had once or twice mildly tried to find out whether Will thought it likely that anything of that sort might occur, showing that he himself did not think it improbable; but Will felt he knew his Mary better than that—only that now she was not his Mary. Well! Let Joe say what he would; Will did not care. He returned to reality with a start to find a woman giving evidence. But it was not Mary. The woman, it appeared, was the daughter of the publican of the Moorcock inn and was walking down Scape Scar Lane into Marthwaite on the evening of the murder to make some purchases when she met Joe climbing the hill. (“But what on earth would he be doing there at that time?” thought Will contemptuously.) She passed the time of day with him, then went down into Marthwaite; the clock struck six as she crossed Marthwaite Bridge. It struck Will that, unlike the other witnesses for the defence, who were telling true tales except for some mistake, deliberate or otherwise, of day or hour, this woman’s tale was entirely false and she knew it to be so. She was a big, handsome, bright-coloured lass, but very nervous at present; her colour came and went, and she fidgeted constantly with her handkerchief. Joe seemed to be gazing at her in a mild bewilderment, which changed to pity when the urbane Mr. Topping proceeded to make mincemeat of her story. He so confused her that she contradicted everything she had said several times over, and then, adopting a kinder tone, seemed to wish to get her to admit that it was not Joe she saw at all.