This was, however, not the main cause of my disillusionment with the salt trade, which lay more in the antiquated and regulated manner in which the industry was organised. Salt manufacture in Nantwich was organised according to the so-called ‘Customs of Walling’; ancient salt laws which went back as far as anyone could remember and ensured that ‘Old Biot’ remained a public resource to be managed for the benefit of the whole community.
The laws specified the exact number of wich houses allowed in the town – two hundred and sixteen, all of which had to contain the same number of leads, the large kettles used to boil the brine. With each of these two hundred and sixteen wich houses came a right for twelve days walling per year, each walling consisting of twenty-four hours plus a two hour allowance for cleaning.
Because wich houses came with walling rights, over time the rights were sold, with the result that a wich house was not necessarily a physical entity. Some wich house owners had bought rights from others and could therefore produce more salt in their own buildings. Others had closed their wich houses completely, but still held walling rights and sub-contracted these rights to other wich houses.
This might have been acceptable to me, had it only been the amount of salt produced per wich house that was limited. However, the ownership of walling rights was also rationed. Married men were allowed thirty-six leads, the equivalent of six wich houses, whilst single men and widows were limited to half that amount, another reason, according to Mrs Padgett, why I should hurry up and find myself a wife.
I fully understood that the customs of walling existed in order to maintain the use of the brine pit for the common good of the people of Nantwich, but it stopped people like me from developing and expanding their businesses. The result was that wich houses stayed idle for much of the year and the only way to make money was to contract walling work for those who had walling rights but no wich house. Salt-making was truly a business for men with no ambition.
Anyone trying to beat the system by dishonest means was taking a great risk, for walling was heavily policed by four Rulers of Walling elected from those who had walling rights. Like my own position as constable, the rulers were elected at the Michaelmas Court Leet and served for a year. John Davenport himself had previously held one of these positions and it was a role I knew I would be expected to carry out myself sooner or later. The role of the Rulers of Walling was to estimate the price of salt and to allot the time of each person’s walling in order to make sure that no wich house was disadvantaged. This was carried out during a process known as ‘making meet’. The Rulers also had to be present at the start and the end of each kindling to make sure the rules were adhered to. Anyone not complying with them ran the risk of being ostracised by the community and having his wich house pulled down.
All these factors had combined to bring me to the realisation that the life of a brine worker was not for me. My ambition was to develop my cheese business to the point where it could support me on its own, and then to sell the walling rights and wich house to somebody else. In the meantime, though, until that dream could be realised, I would need to continue to work my allocated walling and make as much as I could from what was essentially a stagnating business.
That being the case, my first task before calling on Davenport was to visit my own wich house. So, having turned right into Great Wood Street, Alexander and I stopped short of the building with the smoking chimneys and entered the one next to it.
My wich house was laid out exactly the same as all the other wich houses in the town. Down one side of the building stood the ship – the huge wooden trough used to hold the brine, enough for four days walling or one kindling. In front of this stood six hearths, each with a large iron pan about a yard square. Behind the hearths were a series of stone pipes, through which heat was funnelled to an adjacent storeroom where the wet salt was stored and dried in barrows, huge egg-shaped barrels made of wicker, which allowed the leach brine to drain out.
It was here that I located James Skinner, who was busy stoking the fires, in order to make sure that the storeroom was warm enough to dry out the salt produced during my last kindling, which had been completed a few days earlier.
“Good morning, Master Cheswis,” he said, as Alexander and I entered the room.
“Good morning, James,” I replied. “You are on your own here?”
“Yes, sir. Mr Robinson is next door with Mr Davenport. He left me to stoke the fires and ready some salt for shipment. I am to report to him as soon as I’ve finished.”
Gilbert Robinson was my head waller, responsible for all production within the wich house. Like many such people, he was contracted to several wich house owners, one of whom was John Davenport. I had no problem with Skinner being used to help Davenport during his kindling, as the favour would no doubt be returned the next time I had a kindling of my own. What I did have a problem with, though, was Skinner disappearing whenever he felt like it, so I made sure I took advantage of the opportunity to quiz him about his whereabouts on Saturday morning. Skinner, for his part, had clearly expected to be chided for his absence and was ready with his excuse.
“It was my father,” he said. “He was taken ill. He suffers from the falling sickness, and on Saturday morning he was taken with a seizure and fell into the fireplace. If my brothers hadn’t been there, he’d have been badly burned. I was sent for to help tend him.” Skinner’s excuse was no doubt a good one, but I was not feeling particularly charitable that morning.
“That’s all very well,” I countered, “but you can’t just abandon your work at a moment’s notice. You inconvenienced Mrs Padgett, who could not do her work, you inconvenienced Alexander and my brother because they had to take over the stall. What’s more, a number of pieces of cheese were missing. I can’t afford to lose half my profits to thieves.”
Skinner gave me a sullen glance and, avoiding looking me directly in the eye, mumbled a further apology. I sighed in frustration as Alexander looked on.
“I have to be honest with you, James. You are no use to me as an apprentice if you cannot be relied upon. You need to think carefully about where your best interests lie.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then be sure to finish off your work here and hasten over to Mr Robinson. I have a feeling the Davenports will need every spare hand they can muster this morning.”
Skinner poked at the fire once more, and shrugged.
“The work here is more or less finished, Master Cheswis.”
“In that case, you can make your way over there now. I’ll finish tidying up.” Skinner laid down the shovel he was using to put coal into the furnaces and scuttled out of the room.
Alexander looked at me with raised eyebrows. “I think you were a little hard on Skinner, there,” he ventured. “His father was genuinely ill, so I hear, and, after all, he’s just a lad. If you want to nurture an apprentice who will eventually buy this business from you, treating him like that will get you nowhere.”
In contrast to my own deserted building, John Davenport’s wich house was a hive of activity. With four days walling work to be completed, brine workers from across the town had descended upon Davenport’s premises like bees to a honey pot, and they were now busy carrying out the various stages of the kindling, with the five-hour boiling process at each of the six leads having been staggered to ensure maximum efficiency.
At the nearest hearth to the entrance, workers were filling one of the large iron pans with brine and surrounding it with clay and bricks, ready to begin boiling the brine. At the adjacent lead, I noticed the short, square-jawed figure of Gilbert Robinson adding a mixture of brine and cow’s blood to a full pan of boiling brine. Once he had finished doing this, he moved onto a third lead, in which the brine had already half-evaporated. Into this he added a mixture of brine and egg-white. Then he approached the fourth lead and poured a small beaker of ale into it. Whilst this was happening, I noticed that James Skinner was stood beside Robinson with a large scoop in his hand and realised
that my apprentice had been entrusted with the job of cleaning the scum out of the second and third leads as the brine gradually evaporated.
As soon as Robinson moved away, Skinner began frantically scooping out the scum from the pans and transferring it into a trough already half full of scrapings. This would eventually be sold by the cartload as manure.
Robinson now moved onto the fifth lead and instructed brine workers to reduce the fire so that they could ladle in the leach brine. This process was already well underway at the sixth and final lead, where a number of female briners were busy with their loots, the special wooden rakes used to scoop out the salt that had gathered in the corners of the pans and deposit it in the wicker barrows waiting nearby.
Once he had finished, Robinson caught my eye and waved me over, simultaneously wiping the sweat from his brow with his other arm.
“Warm work, Gilbert?” I said.
“Yes, Master Cheswis, but better than being outside on a day like today.”
“That it is,” I concurred. “I see you left Skinner to the job of stoking the fires.”
“Yes. I’m mortal sorry I had to leave him, but I needed to be here to supervise Mr Davenport’s walling and to be present when the Rulers arrived to watch over the start of the kindling. I thought a little responsibility would do him good.”
“Well, you’ve certainly rewarded him with the best job in the house now,” I said, as I observed the youth sullenly depositing the detritus from the kindling into the trough behind him. At that moment, a thought struck me. “You said the Rulers have already been. You mean there was more than one of them?”
“That’s right,” replied Robinson. “I thought it odd too. Normally there’s only one of them, but today both Mr Wickstead and Mr Kinshaw turned up. They said something about the need to keep a closer eye on walling activities to prevent fraud, with the market being so low and all.” Robinson was right that this was rather irregular. There had been, I remembered, only one Ruler present at my own kindling no more than a few days previously. Still, I mused, Wickstead and Kinshaw must have had a good reason for tightening up their monitoring activities. I returned to the matter in hand and asked where I could find Davenport. Robinson motioned over towards the storeroom.
I was not looking forward to interviewing John Davenport, for I had known him ever since I had begun my apprenticeship. Although he was ten years older than me, he had helped me considerably with my business over the years and I considered him to be a friend. I had shared a table with him, his wife, and his four daughters and felt uncomfortable about having to question him, in the knowledge that he might be guilty of murder.
I found him stripped to the waist, manoeuvring the remaining barrows from his last kindling to one side, in order to make way for the new ones that would be produced over the next four days. It was even warmer in the storeroom, and Davenport’s shoulder-length brown hair was tinged with sweat as he manhandled the heavy containers of salt across the room. He nodded in recognition as Alexander and I walked through the door, stopping only when he realised that Alexander had positioned himself by the doorway, in case it proved necessary to prevent an attempt at a rapid exit.
“What can I do for you, Daniel?” he asked, breathing heavily from the exertion. “It’s a busy morning.”
“I need to ask you some questions about William Tench,” I began.
“Who?”
“Come on, John. Don’t be evasive,” I insisted. “Tench was a tanner from Hospital Street. You were seen arguing with him in The White Swan on Saturday evening. Now he’s dead – battered and strangled behind the tavern.”
“Oh, him,” conceded Davenport. “Serves the bastard right. Cheated me in a wager, he did.”
“A wager?”
“A game of hazard. You can ask in The Angel. There were plenty of people that saw it. Those dice were loaded, I’ll swear it.”
“You mean you admit it?”
Davenport stopped what he was doing and leant on the barrow he had been manhandling. “Admit what?” he barked, giving me a shocked look. “You mean you think I killed him? I’m no murderer, Daniel. I didn’t do it, but I expect he deserved what he got.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone would have got him sooner or later. He was well-known for asking awkward questions. There’s those that think he’s a royalist spy.”
I thought about this for a moment and decided to change tack. “Tell me what your argument was about,” I demanded. “And why go to The White Swan? Why meet in a tavern at the end of Welsh Row when there are two perfectly acceptable ones within a hundred yards of your wich house?”
“He said I owed him more than I do and asked me to meet him there. I expect he wanted to avoid discussing such things in taverns like The Angel and The Black Lion, because he knew he would be in the presence of friends of mine.” What Davenport was saying made sense, but there was something in the tone of his voice that gave me the suspicion that something was not quite right.
“And the money you left at Comberbach’s?” I continued.
“That was what I owed him. I didn’t know he’d died until Saturday afternoon.”
“That could just be a cover up to put us off the scent,” I suggested.
“You think I did it?”
“I don’t know, John,” I admitted. “I’ve known you long enough to think you would not commit such a foul crime, but the circumstantial evidence is not good. Others around the town are beginning to talk, and that raises the possibility that Tench’s relatives might come after you. For your own protection I should put you in jail until I get to the bottom of this whole affair. I have to do my duty. I can’t be seen to be soft, just because I know you.”
At this, Davenport’s expression changed from one of stubborn resistance to one of abject horror.
“Daniel. If you do that I’ll never get out. You know that,” he pleaded. “I’ll be hanging this time next week. I’ve also got the four days’ walling to consider. How am I supposed to manage that in jail?”
I was on the point of offering to look after Davenport’s affairs whilst I got the bottom of what had happened to Tench, when I felt an almighty blow in my guts and found myself sprawling on the floor, winded. Fortunately, the heavy barrow that Davenport had pushed into my midriff did not land directly on top of me, but had rolled away to the right, spilling salt all over the floor. Davenport, meanwhile, had sprinted for the doorway in a bid to surprise Alexander, but my friend was not so easily duped. He now held Davenport in a bear hug, the latter’s legs kicking wildly in the air as he struggled frantically to get free.
“That was a mistake, John,” I wheezed, fighting for breath. “Only a guilty man tries something like that. I will do everything I can to investigate this matter thoroughly and I will make sure this is done correctly. I’ll also make sure Robinson is briefed to complete your kindling properly. But you are going to have to sit in jail.”
With that, Alexander pinned Davenport’s arms behind his back and marched him, moaning profusely, in the direction of the exit.
7
Nantwich – Monday, December 11, 1643
It doesn’t add up,” I said to Alexander, after Davenport had safely been locked away in the cells and we had both returned to my house for lunch. “I could have sworn John Davenport was not the type of person to do this.”
“You can never know the depths a man will sink to,” said my friend, attacking with gusto the plate of mince and onions Mrs Padgett had placed in front of him.
“Yes, but there’s more to this than meets the eye,” I persisted. “Davenport seemed genuinely surprised we thought he was the murderer.”
“That means nothing. He could just be a good actor.”
“But what about the money that he delivered to the Comberbachs on Saturday morning and the note that he sent with it?”
“As you say, that could just be a ruse to make us think he didn’t do it.”
“Yes, but it’s a bit obvious, isn’t
it?”
Alexander could do nothing but agree. We sat for a while in silence – silence that is, save for the sound of my friend eating. I considered the situation. Something just didn’t make sense. Why have such a public row over a two pound gambling debt? Two pounds was a reasonable amount of money, but it was not enough to kill for. There was also something in the tone of Davenport’s voice that suggested some other unknown factor was behind his behaviour. If I didn’t know better, I would have said it seemed like fear. But fear of what? What could Davenport be afraid of? And why risk the hangman’s noose by drawing attention to himself like that?
Then there was the question of the crimson sash. What was its importance? I could have sworn Randle Church recognised it when I produced it in his drawing-room the day before. And where did Tench and the rumours surrounding his clandestine spying activities fit in? I turned to Alexander and articulated what I had been thinking.
He squinted at me and belched onion breath in my direction. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s a conundrum of the highest order, and, if I know you, you’ll not rest until we get to the bottom of it. There is, however, a time and place for everything, and now is the time for Mrs Padgett’s apple cake!” As if on cue, my housekeeper appeared in the doorway and placed a plate in front of each of us.
“It is remarkable how the world seems a much simpler place when apple cake is involved,” I said, and tucked in heartily.
The Lamb was bustling with activity when I arrived there later in the afternoon. The impressive coaching house had always been among the more prestigious of the hostelries within the town, but since it had been commandeered by the garrison as its headquarters, it had effectively become an officers’ residence. Unlike the common soldiers of the garrison, who, depending on their rank, were billeted in local houses, barns, and tents, Booth and his officers could rely on some degree of comfort during their stay in Nantwich. Having negotiated the two stone-faced halberdiers who stood guarding the entrance to the earthworks surrounding the hotel, I was led by another soldier into a drawing room in the rear of the building, which had been transformed into Booth’s personal office.
The Winter Siege (Daniel Cheswis Book 1) Page 7