Inheritance

by Phyllis Bentley

  “I believe I ought to go into all this thoroughly,” he said.

  He turned out the electric lamp at his bedside and lay down, but his mind was too excited for sleep; he tossed to and fro restlessly for an hour, then gave it up, turned on his light again and picked up the shabby, old, thin little book which gave an almost verbatim report of the Luddites’ trials. And as he read steadily on through the small hours, while the earth turned into light once again and brought another day, he began to see, to see clearly although it was across a distance of more than a hundred years, the actors in this final scene. He saw Mellor, thin and fair and quivering with rage, rather like Uncle Matthew only somehow paler and wilder; he saw Thorpe, dark and small and jesting, always full of fun and making faces; he saw Jonathan Bamforth—ah! he saw him very clearly and loved him, with his thin dreamy face and his loving brown eyes. Joe was the best whistler in the Ire Valley, said Martha Ackroyd at the trial; Joe could write, and loved to read the papers; Joe to the other Luddites was like good beer to seconds. “Can’t you see he’s innocent?” cried David angrily to judge and jury, as he devoured the evidence of message and cropping shop and pistols, of written oaths and whistling to the collier in the Emsley inn. “He’s absolutely innocent—he hadn’t a pistol, he didn’t fire a shot, he didn’t mean to murder William Oldroyd. He’d no idea the others intended it till he reached Syke Mill Lane. Oh, you idiot!” David apostrophised the Luddites’ lawyer; “Don’t you see the point about there being only three pistols? Don’t you see that Walker said only two men sent the message? Why didn’t you make the child corroborate that? Why, you might have saved Joe as easily as anything; you threw his life away!”

  The jury were absent twenty-five minutes, he mused; fancy waiting twenty-five minutes to hear whether you were to live or die i Horrible! Have you anything to say why the court should not pronounce sentence upon you? “If I’d been Joe,” thought David vehemently: “I’d have had a good deal to say. Yes, by God, I would. I wonder why he didn’t defend himself instead of just murmuring ‘Not Guilty’?” David mused a little, and then said slowly: “He wanted to die with his friends, I think.”

  He read on, of the barbarous sentence of hanging and dissection, of Will’s petition that the execution should be held in Syke Mill Lane—“Ohj really!” said David, shocked—of the final early morning scene: the cold, the crowd, the gallows, the dying speeches. Bamforth, who was the last to suffer, said: “Farewell, lads,” in a quiet tone. “Oh, Joe!” mourned David. “Why did you do it? Why didn’t you defend yourself? Why did you let yourself be hanged?”

  He had a tremendous longing to rush out and find Joe, seize him by the hand, explain to him that he, David Brigg Oldroyd, understood perfectly that Joe was innocent and had died with his friends simply because he couldn’t bear to desert them. “Everybody understands that now,” he imagined himself telling Joe: “Everybody” But that was only fancy; he couldn’t reach Joe ever, Joe was dead; Joe hadn’t even a grave; his body had been chopped up into bits for doctors to play with.

  “Oh damn!” said David, throwing down the thin green book.

  “I don’t suppose he’d mind, though …”

  “He’d think it was all for the good of humanity …”

  Some lines of Hardy’s came into David’s head:

  We would establish men of kindlier build

  In fair compassions skilled,

  Men of deep art in life-development;

  Watchers and warders of thy varied lands,

  Men surfeited of laying hands

  Upon the innocent,

  The mild, the fragile, the obscure content,

  Among the myriads of thy family.

  Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,

  And make their daily moves a melody.

  “In fair compassions skilled” mused David: “That’s Joe all over. And you wouldn’t find Joe laying hands on the mild and fragile. And he loved the true and the excellent all right, and perhaps had deep art in life-development. He certainly understood other people’s feelings. But I don’t think he could have been a watcher and warder; he hadn’t the strength of will. You want the Oldroyds for that—but then, the Oldroyds aren’t skilled in fair compassions. The Bamforths and the Oldroyds should be mixed.”

  He stared.

  Perhaps they were mixed. Bamforth. Uncle Henry. Oldroyd. Mellor. There was something vague about the children of Will Oldroyd, reflected David; he had never quite understood, never quite been allowed to understand, the Bamforth relationship to the Oldroyds. A touch of illegitimacy somewhere, I fancy, mused David, smiling with a kindly tolerance for these old-fashioned people who made such a fuss about marriage laws. These history books, of course, gave only a public account of the affair of the murder; there was no private life in them. He must draw up a genealogical table. He must write to Uncle Henry. There were all sorts of other things he wanted to know. Was the Emsley Hall chauffeur, good old Ackroyd, for example, connected with that kind Martha Ackroyd of the Moorcock Inn, who loved Joe’s whistling, and lied to try and save his life? Were those chased silver spurs which Henry Brigg borrowed, the same as the ones David’s father now owned? If so they had been to France in the War, which was rather jolly; old William Oldroyd would have liked that, David thought. Was it that Henry Brigg who gave Francis and David their middle name? Gould it by any chance be the fact that the blood of the three murderers was mingled with that of the Oldroyds, the Stancliffes and the Briggs in David’s veins?

  “I shall have to go into this very thoroughly indeed,” said David firmly.

  He turned out his lamp and lay down again, and this time he slept.

  4

  Ella, meeting David on the stairs a week or so later with a heavy armful of books, was moved to remonstrate.

  “You do nothing but sit upstairs and read and write all day, David,” she said. “You ought to be outside, enjoying your last days at Emsley Hall. I have to stay in to pack the china and linen, but you should be out, you should take Fan out, you shouldn’t stay in reading those great heavy books all day. What are they all about?”

  “It’s a piece of historical research I’m doing,” David told her soberly, “about the Ire Valley.”

  Ella was impresed. “Well, of course if it’s something important,” she said on a yielding note. “Still I think you ought to be out in this nice sunshine, David.”

  “I’ll go out this afternoon,” conceded David. “I can’t take Fan to-day, but I will to-morrow.”

  5

  And accordingly immediately after lunch he set out alone, armed with a map, a notebook, and a list of places he wanted to see.

  He called first at the Coach and Horses Inn in Emsley. The proprietor was considerably astonished to see young Master Oldroyd from the Hall, in his grey flannel suit and school tie, inside his premises, and hovered about him uncomfortably, hesitating on the brink of telling him that he could not serve anyone of David’s age.

  “I don’t want anything to drink,” explained David, laughing. “I only want to see the place where they do it.”

  The proprietor led him into the stuffy little bar-parlour, stale with the smell of beer, and looked at David dubiously, as though to enquire how that could interest him. “Is it the same as it was a hundred and twenty years ago?” asked David, looking ground at the wainscotted walls and the spittoons, the advertisements of Yorkshire ales and the gramophone.

  “Eh, I don’t know,” said the man, shaking his head in alarm. “I’m sure I couldn’t tell you. It’s a long time ago, is yon. I’ve only been here eight year.”

  David emerged into the August sunshine with relief. “Well, that was rather disappointing,” he told himself, retracing his steps up the valley towards Emsley Hall. “And yet I don’t know that it was,” he continued thoughtfully. “I can just see the drunken collier jumping about in that stuffy place, and poor Joe hating it, and whistling frantically to keep his end up. Really important things happen to real people in real places, and n
ot to stage characters in velvet and ermine. And conversely,” he argued: “Things that happen to ordinary-looking people in stuffy pubs may be very important. Well, we knew that before. Zola. De Maupassant. Arnold Bennett. I think this will be about the place where the murderers came down,” he decided, pausing and looking up at Emsley Brow. “They obviously came through fields and woods, and not by the Emsley Brow road lower down the valley.”

  He climbed the low unmortared wall which bordered the road, and struck upwards across the fields.

  It was a glorious summer’s day; the sky was very blue, with scarcely a cloud; there was no breeze, the sun beat down quite fiercely. David, taking a line of his own straight across country, independent of paths, found it hot work; he also managed to lose himself in the wood, and was a considerable time before he reached the top of the brow and began the steep descent. “What a stew those murderers must have been in puffing up here after a deed like that,” said David, mopping his brow. He found a rocky stream and decided to follow it down the hill. “This must be the Black Syke,” he said, consulting his map. “If I follow it right down to the Ire it should bring me to Syke Mill.”

  He kept to the stream closely, scrambling over rocks and tussocks of grass along its banks, and all of a sudden found himself in the presence of a little old ruined mill. Some of the walls had fallen in, and grass was growing over the tumbled stones; a house near by was also decayed and falling. “But this can’t be it,” said David, puzzled. He looked at the map again. “Oh, it’s Bin Royd,” he exclaimed, enlightened. “Little Henry Brigg’s place.” He looked about him and smiled. The place was so utterly peaceful; nothing human, nothing animal, was in sight; no bird sang; there was no sound save that of the little stream, purling cheerfully down over its small black rocks. “Will Oldroyd must have come here courting many a time,” thought David. He walked up to the ruined mill, and placed a hand on its black old wall. “Well, little Mr. Henry Brigg!” he said softly. “Here I am. I’m your descendant, you know; I’ve got your name. How do you like that, old chap? Eh?”

  There was a long silence; the sun shone steadily down on grass and rock and ruined mill; the little stream gurgled cheerfully.

  “It’s a pity I don’t believe in personal immortality,” mused David. “It would be nice to think of jolly old Brigg looking down on me and all that sort of thing. But of course I don’t believe in it. Still there is something,” he mused. “However! I must move on.”

  He roused himself, scrambled across the stream, and followed the lane which was now discernible, down the hill.

  Soon the lane turned away from the stream, and presently became a long grimy street with rows of little houses on either side. David was furious.

  “Everything will be different,” he told himself angrily. “If this is the only result of the industrial revolution it’s a pity it ever started. Jf I can’t find the corner of Syke Mill Lane I shall swear.”

  The grimy little street brought him out into Marthwaite village, so he decided to explore this before proceeding down the valley to Syke Mill. He went into the Red Lion, had a cup of tea and talked to the landlord about the murder in 1812. The landlord, though he had forgotten the name of the murdered man, knew the story, seemed to take an interest in David—“It’s extraordinary how kind everyone is,” thought David—and conducted him solemnly round all the dark little bedrooms upstairs. He didn’t know which was the actual room where William Oldroyd died, but if David saw them all he would be sure to see that one, wouldn’t he? David agreed that he would, and the landlord seemed to derive much pleasure from this thought. Did the landlord know an old house further up the valley called Dean Head House? The landlord did not, but said that there were a two-three tumbledown old places up there between the railway line and the reservoir; he couldn’t rightly say whether the land round there belonged to the railway company or the Annotsfield Town Council, nowadays; it was one or the other, anyhow, and they were rather strict about trespassing. David thanked him and went off up the valley.

  It was not very difficult to discover Dean Head House. The rough lane which led down to it was quite plainly visible, though walled up at the road end and overgrown with grass. A notice board near by warned the trespasser off in the name of the Annotsfield Town Council. David sprang over the blocking wall and made his way down towards the Ire; in the distance he could see the reservoir, below it the river and the railway line, with the entrance to Marthwaite tunnel, and between the a few grey old cottages in various stages of decay. Some were mere mounds of stones, others retained something of a dwelling’s shape. Dean Head House was the largest of these; it stood on the lane which David was descending, and the twined initials above the boarded doorway proclaimed it an Oldroyd’s house. David, meditatively whistling Sweet and lovely, stood in the cobbled yard and tried to form a mental picture of the life that went on there in the days when wool was spun and woven, dyed and dressed, by hand. He was in the middle of this when he heard a shout, and perceived a man in uniform hurrying towards him from the reservoir. David fled. His youth and training enabled him easily to outdistance his pursuer, and he skipped over the wall into the road when the man was still many yards distant.

  “Ah, you young besom!” shouted the official: “What were you up to down there, eh?”

  “My ancestors used to live in that house,” shouted David in reply, laughing. As he was not now trespassing he waited for the man to come up to him.

  “Well, I daresay it was well-thought of in its time,” said the man, taking off his cap to cool his brow and surveying Dean Head House disparagingly. “But you shouldn’t go trespassing, you know, especially on a hot day like this.”

  They laughed together; then David returned to Marthwaite. He glanced into the church, and looked about outside for the tombs of his ancestors. To his great pleasure he found them all in a corner together, in an old section of the churchyard separated from the rest, across the road: William Oldroyd of Dean Head House and Syke Mill, foully murdered in 1812, a lot of little Oldroyds a few months old, Elizabeth the dearly loved wife of William Oldroyd of Syke Mill, the aforesaid William Oldroyd of Syke Mill, Mary the relict of the aforesaid William Oldroyd. Enoch Smith of Marthwaite, Henry Brigg of Bin Royd. It seemed to David simply maddening that the bones, the actual bones of all these people were lying in the earth beneath his feet, and yet they couldn’t see him standing there, they couldn’t hear him, they couldn’t know what was in his mind, they couldn’t talk to him. He knew some of the things that had been in their minds, however, and those things had, in the long run, made him. If those people had felt, and talked, and acted differently, the Ire Valley wouldn’t be what it was now. Well! It was all very odd, mused David, walking away soberly, and he was very sorry that poor Joe’s bones, and those of George Mellor, and of jolly little Tom Thorpe, were not to be found there. It was rather sad to think of them being messed about and scattered—especially innocent Joe’s.

  As he passed the door of the Red Lion the landlord came out, pipe in hand, and called to him.

  “Did you find yon old house you wanted?” he cried.

  “Yes, thank you,” replied David, shading his eyes with his hand to look at him.

  “Now I’ll show you something else that’ll interest you,” said the landlord eagerly. “Seeing as you like old things. Just come round here wi’ me.” He pointed with his pipe; David, who felt that the afternoon was getting on and he had Syke Mill yet to see, was about to demur, but he felt that the man would be disappointed, so yielded instead with a good grace. The landlord, highly pleased, led him along a quaint old street, very narrow, which debouched on the Ire. He took David’s sleeve and pulled him to one side. “See,” he said, pointing.

  “Why, it’s a packhorse bridge!” cried David, surveying the single arch, the low stone walls, with delight. “What a perfect example! I am glad to have seen it.”

  “Yon’s the new bridge,” explained the landlord, pointing with his pipe to an iron erection higher up the st
ream. “But this is the old one.” He sucked at his pipe and looked at the bridge reflectively. “Very low parapets,” he suggested.

  “Oh,” explained David eagerly: “The weavers used to bring the cloth in on horses or donkeys, you know, and the parapets of the bridge were made low so the cloth could swing over them.”

  “Happen you know all about them past times?” said the landlord with respect.

  “I’ve been studying them pretty thoroughly lately,” said David. “I didn’t know anything about them before.” He went out on to the bridge, and stood there, thinking. Joe Bamforth and George Mellor must have crossed this bridge hundreds of times on their way to and from work. For a long silent minute he deliberately remembered them, gave them the memorial of his thoughts (especially Joe), while the Ire gurgled and splashed beneath his feet. Then the clock of Marthwaite Church struck the hour, and David started. “Now for Syke Mill,” he thought.

  “Well, any time you’re passing, just drop in,” urged the landlord as they parted. “I’ve been right interested hearing about yon bridge.”