by Diana Norman
‘A Christian,’ Betty said, taking off her boots and putting them in the grate. She noticed that, as she did the same, Makepeace picked up the man’s book to read the title. It was Gulliver’s Travels.
Philippa marched in, chattering baby gobbledegook and holding spoons, followed by the men with wooden bowls and a cooking pot that Hedley hung over the fire. ‘Carlins,’ he said. ‘Grey peas.’
It was only courteous to state their business before they accepted his meal, however unappetizing. As Makepeace wasn’t saying anything, Betty asked: ‘This Raby we’re at?’
When he nodded, she felt in the holdall and brought out the documents. He took the papers and held them close to a candle for examination.
It was difficult to tell how old he was from his face in concentration, anything from thirty-five upwards. When he’d greeted Philippa he’d looked younger. The hands holding the papers were criss-crossed with little blue scars; there was another across his flattened nose.
‘I’ve been expecting these. I was sent copies from London.’ He looked up. ‘Mr Burke, where is he? A hard man to find.’
‘Mister Burke?’
‘Ay, Mr Makepeace Burke.’
Betty said: ‘That’s Makepeace Burke. There ain’t no mister.’
He went still. ‘Female.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bought the place from the Headingtons.’
‘Yes.’ She looked at Makepeace through Hedley’s eyes and saw a figure resembling not so much an estate owner as a woman who sold pegs door-to-door. Honesty compelled her to add: ‘She sort of acquired it.’
He asked, flatly: ‘She’s not rich?’
Betty was getting tired of it. ‘We left the jewels and gold coach at the crossroads.’
He nodded. Then he got up and walked out of the room, carefully closing the door behind him. They heard a squawk from hens and the bang of the front door. Betty hurried to the window, Makepeace with her. They cupped their eyes to the glass.
He was standing in the rain, his face lifted to a sky he was threatening with his fists. His mouth was open and glinting like a howling wolf’s.
All at once he stooped to the woodpile and came up with the axe. With a roar that vibrated the window against the watchers’ noses, he hurled it at an outhouse door. For a while he stood, watching it quiver, then turned back.
Hurriedly, the women resumed their places.
When he eventually returned to the room, he’d exchanged his plaid for a jacket and was carrying a jug and beakers. He served them. ‘Nettle beer.’ He slopped the contents of the cauldron into a frying pan and balanced it on the flames while he fetched butter, honey and rum, mixed them into the pan, poured the resultant mess into bowls and handed them round. ‘Eat,’ he said.
He took his own bowl to the corner furthest away from the light and ate, holding his spoon like a shovel. Anger radiated out of him as if from a furnace but he was controlling it.
The food was surprisingly good. The beer wasn’t.
Makepeace broke the silence. ‘What’s wrong with me being a woman, may I ask?’ It was the first time she’d spoken since entering the house and her first question since Dapifer’s death. Betty sat up.
‘Nothing, pet,’ Hedley said, bitterly. ‘You’ve the requisites as far as I can see and wi’ a wheen more flesh I’ve no doubt you’d reduce a lad to ecstasy. But I’d have liked you wealthy, or at the least with access to wealth.’
‘Me too,’ Betty said, with feeling
‘Why?’ Makepeace asked.
But he was musing, resentfully—more to himself than them. ‘I’ve been waiting for rich Mr Burke for over twelvemonth. Even ventured to London in quest of the man and a foul sink it were. Now, who comes tapping at my window? A benighted female.’ He crashed his fist against the wall and left a dent in the plaster. ‘And both of us sitting on a treasure house wi’ no cash to turn the key.’
The noise woke Philippa, who’d been dozing over her bowl, and he was immediately sorry. He apologized to her. She went to sleep again.
‘Treasure house?’ asked Makepeace.
‘Coal, pet.’ He put his face in his hands. ‘Just coal.’
‘Oh, coal.’ For a moment the word ‘treasure’ had conjured sunken galleons, a miser’s hidden hoard, gold from an ancient burial mound.
‘Coal,’ he said, lifting his head, amazed at her tone. ‘That in yon fire, and a’ the fires in London to judge fra the smeech. Stuff as smelts iron and steel, as powers the blast furnaces, as’ll take us to the machine age and free men fra drudgery . . .’
He regarded their incomprehension. ‘God save us the ignorance.’ He went to the grate, grabbed a lump of coal from its scuttle and pressed it into Makepeace’s hand. His skin grated on hers like wood. ‘How many ton o’ coal were dug from the northeast last year, tell me that?’
She shook her head.
‘Two million, give or take. Two million ton.’ He grabbed the stool and sat on it so that his face was level with hers. ‘Can tha take in the size of it? If Ah said a million days ago puts us back centuries before Christ, would tha realize then? You southerners’—it was a dirty word—‘thinks that England’s wealth is corn? Wool? Na, it’s coal. They tell us the Lord Chancellor takes his seat on a woolsack. Wi’ more sense the lad would be sittin’ on a bag o’ coals.’
Hedley swivelled on the stool to face Betty, who was still struggling to multiply the price of a ton of coal in London by two million. ‘An’ that’s without wor new steam pumps. Ah tell thee, coal’s but in its infancy. Who’s got coal’s got riches an’ power an’, better, he’s got the future.’ He got up, shaking his fist at the ceiling. ‘Ah could be the new Prometheus.’ He went to the window and stared into the darkness. ‘An’ what am Ah? Bloody Tantalus. We’re standin’ on the sod and can’t reach it.’
Silence fell over the room as if a high wind had suddenly stopped blowing. They could hear the puff of the fire and Philippa’s slight snores. ‘Howay,’ he said, wearily, ‘no use gollarin’ at the moon. Tha’s not to blame. I’ll light you to your beds.’
Makepeace was turning the coal in her hand so that its facets caught the light, like a black diamond. ‘Why can’t we?’
‘Eh? Oh, equipment, pet. Pump engines, picks, wagons, rails, props. Men to dig, ponies to drag. Outlay of thousands o’ pounds before the gain of ha’pence. The earth surrenders her treasure wi’ parsimony.’
As he took up a candle, Makepeace, still sitting, said: ‘Suppose I’d had money and could’ve got the coal out, it would’ve been my profit, not yours. How would you benefit?’
He looked back at her, grinning, suddenly vulpine. ‘Half, pet. I’m the only one knows where it is.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘Nyumwhaa?’ Betty woke up. Her body told her it was the middle of the night and the dark of the room confirmed it. Complaining, she heaved herself onto her other side. A thin moonlight showed Makepeace standing at the window.
‘Do you believe him?’
Betty yawned. ‘I believe he believe it. But he ain’t sane. What you doin’, girl?’
Makepeace was regarding her hand, where moonlight put a sheen on a piece of coal. ‘Power,’ she said.
‘An’ fairy gold an’ moonshine an’ no use thinkin’ about it—’
‘Know what I’d do with power?’
‘How ’bout sleepin’?’
‘I’d crucify them.’
It should have been a moment for the Nunc Dimittis but Betty felt no inclination to say it. She was suddenly chilled. She’d wanted Makepeace angry, but this wasn’t anger; it was too matter-of-fact, too quiet; this was decay, a cold malignancy that infected the carrier.
She heaved herself out of bed. ‘You don’ want to worry ’bout them no more,’ she said. ‘They get their come-uppance. Di’n’t the Lord say He goin’ to deal out vengeance? He got them in his sights. Sure as taxes, he’ll see to ’em.’
‘He won’t,’ Makepeace said. ‘He doesn’t. He just keeps lettin
g them crucify His son.’
Betty put her arms around her. ‘You git back to bed, chil’, give that baby a cuddle. You well again now, this place perked you up, bless the Lord. Maybe tomorrow we see what we kin do with it, maybe it ain’t so bad as it looks.’
She was embracing marble. It said: ‘I’m going to crucify them. As sure as Jesus gave His blood for me, they’re going to shed theirs, every last drop, for Philip Dapifer.’
She slept late next morning. The room was empty, a small dint in the pillow next to her where her child had lain. It was a cupboard bed, the higher of two that took up an entire wall—she’d had to climb up to it by ladder; Philippa had loved it—and of surprising beauty inside where the panels were carved with festoons of leaves and apples.
At one end, shelves of books held the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, Smollett’s History of England, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, a grammar and a dictionary, the library of a man educating himself; but the greater section was taken up with home-made folders of canvas, their titles neatly inked: ‘Coke-smelting’, ‘Crucible-casting’, ‘Puddling and Rolling’, ‘Steam Atmospheric Engines’, ‘Drainage’, ‘Coal Damp’, ‘Circulation of Air’.
She washed with water from a ewer set on the windowsill. It was a lovely morning, laundered by last night’s rain. Immediately below, the view of the yard was still unprepossessing but beyond it the hills were a palette of gentle colours and the air smelled of bracken and grass, like spring. But it was no longer spring, it was autumn.
Philippa, who was being led round the yard on a donkey by the man Hedley, caught sight of her and waved. Awkwardly, Makepeace waved back.
In the bad place she had been occupying, Philippa had demanded an energy and attention she’d found difficult to give. If the child had been the boy Dapifer had thought it to be there would have been a dearer connection in her mind between father and baby. As it was, ‘It’s a girl’ had seemed at the time yet another betrayal of a betrayed man, the birth merely part of the loss. Mentally, if not physically, she had neglected her daughter.
The little girl mostly went to Betty when she was troubled, even to Fanny or Aaron, instinctively avoiding the invisible fence of grief that surrounded her mother. And Makepeace did not know how to bridge it.
She’d be a year old now.
Twelve months. How in hell had she survived them, in Hell with the damned? Such laceration, she’d had to crawl into the deepest part of her soul to withstand the agony. Something, God she supposed, had been stitching the wounds to preserve the patient from bleeding to death, but so haphazardly had He done it that the result of the recovery was of appalling ugliness, a lopsided, limping freak in permanent pain.
With survival, if it could be called survival, the outside world had crashed in and brought with it this flooding hatred.
It was almost amusing, Makepeace thought, that what Catty and Conyers must see as the deepest injury they’d inflicted on her was, in fact, the least. They would be rejoicing at their cleverness in stealing Dapifer’s wealth, his status, his lands, and they could have had them without trouble; they’d only ever been peripheral to her. If they’d said: ‘Sign over all his worldly goods and we’ll allow you to attend him while he dies . . .’ But they were incapable of even that grace.
Certain sure, she would kill them for it one day. But the reason she would make them suffer before they died, see them chomped alive from the feet up like fledglings being eaten by a hedgehog, was for their petty cruelty, the malice that had kept her from burying him, of separating her from Andrew Ffoulkes, not caring how they hurt the boy as long as they hurt her.
And for the visit to the attic room in Holborn, that last banal gloat Catty had found irresistible—a revenge, Makepeace supposed, for her own ill-judged expedition to Catty’s house in Great Russell Street.
‘What did she say?’ Betty had asked and asked.
The thing was, she’d said nothing, just stood in the doorway and smiled: at the dingy room, at the grate’s two pieces of coal, at other people’s clothes on the airing horses, at the wounded thing in the middle of them.
And one day, when you’re in the last extremity, I shall stand in your doorway. And I’ll be smiling. Hear my prayer, dear Lord, for the power to put the earth back in balance by hurling her to bottomless perdition. Hear my prayer. Only that. If I have to fall in after her, Lord, hear my prayer.
She picked up the piece of coal from the windowsill and looked down again at the man who’d given it to her. He’d hoisted Philippa on his shoulders now and was trying to talk to Tantaquidgeon who stood watching.
The man had no respect; his language was foul but he was kindly enough, for all his anger. In effect, this was his house, the factor’s house. He’d casually surrendered it to them last night; Headington House itself was a ruin, he’d said. He’d gone off to sleep in his workshop at what he called the but ’n’ bens along the track.
She knew his type. Another one who wants power, she thought, though she was too incurious to wonder what he wanted it for. Men like him had visited the Roaring Meg; rough, capable artisans obsessed by a dream: to find El Dorado, or discover a passage to the Pacific Ocean.
‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’
She would go down and see.
At her approach he swung Philippa down from his shoulders. ‘Off you come, Pip.’
‘Don’t call her that.’
He glanced up. His gentle ‘All right, pet’ told her that Betty had been talking to him.
She was irritated. ‘About this coal . . .’ she snapped.
They went indoors for the discussion. Betty had been busy already; the passageway that had accommodated last night’s animals was swept and washed. The clank of pots and a smell of rabbit stew came from the kitchen. The fire in the parlour was newly laid with coals.
He set the chair for her and took the stool. ‘You’d best sell,’ he said. ‘It’s what I advised yon Mr Headington in wor letters. Sell, I told him, if you’re not interested, sell to them as is, but the lad would never give us his attention.’
‘Too busy gambling,’ Makepeace said.
Hedley raised his eyebrows. ‘Were that it? They were ever a porvorse family.’
He had the estate’s books and accounts ready to show her, all meticulously kept. Raby had been a prosperous manor in the days of the Commonwealth but, he said, had since suffered a hundred years of neglect from being awarded to a Sir Henry Headington, an acolyte of Charles II, ‘a pornicious monarch’ in Hedley’s opinion.
To the Headingtons Northumberland had always been here-be-dragons land; they preferred London and their vast holdings in the south, ‘though they bleated quick enough if they worn’t sent the rents’.
Without repair the manor house had eventually fallen down; workers had left; there had been no investment into more advanced breeding of sheep so the wool from which the Headingtons derived their income had been outclassed by that from other, better-managed estates.
They’d been fortunate in having an honest factor—Andra Hedley’s grandfather, a man with a head for business, who’d begged his employers to speculate in order to accumulate.
‘He quoted Francis Bacon at ’em ’til he bubbled. Money’s like muck, he told ’em, no good ’less it’s spread. Would they hear him? I doubt they read his letters. “Keep up the rents, Mr Hedley.” So he did, canny man. He found ’em coal. Would they put money in it? “Just keep up the rents, Mr Hedley.” ’ He glared at Makepeace as if it were her fault. ‘We dug what we could and the main seam was there, ready as a lass on a Saturday night, but she wouldn’t wait for ever and she didn’t.’
Makepeace shifted. Coal was not a substance she was acquainted with: it had never been used at the Roaring Meg; Mrs Peplow had refused to desecrate the Grosvenor Square chimneys with it—mineral fuel was still regarded as dirtily vulgar by the gentry’s old guard—and in Hertfordshire it had been unnecessary to burn anything except logs from the estate. As for where it came from . . . she’d supposed
, when she supposed at all, that it lay around in dark, wild areas where dark, wild men—not unlike this one—shovelled it into sacks.
‘Can’t you just find another seam?’ she asked.
Hedley lowered his head and drummed his fist on his forehead. After a minute he looked up. ‘Get your boots on.’
They set out along a continuation of last night’s track. As Tantaquidgeon fell in behind them, Hedley asked: ‘Is that lad mum fra choice?’
‘Wounded,’ Makepeace said, shortly. ‘The talking bit of his brain got hacked away by another tribe.’
‘How old is he?’
She shrugged. ‘About five.’
‘Pity,’ Hedley said. He paused for a moment. ‘What’re you to be called? Mrs Burke? Lady Dapifer? What?’
Betty had been busy. Makepeace was suddenly at a loss; what creature was it that had been spewed out to begin another dreary round of acquaintanceships? She couldn’t answer him because she truly didn’t know. Lady Dapifer? She’d yet to win that title back and, anyway, having gone to ground she was reluctant to call attention to herself. And you couldn’t call yourself Hate, it wasn’t a name.
Hedley was striding on, either from impatience or a reluctance to witness her confusion. She hurried to catch him up, the matter unresolved.
Going upwards, the track became a green lane sunk between beeches that diffused the sun into penny-sized dapples. A path to the right led to a row of cottages but they kept straight on.
At the top of the hill two gates marked an overgrown drive to a ruin. Ravens perched on its tumble of stones, stabbing their beaks into the ivy in search of insects.
‘Headington House,’ Hedley said as they went by.
They came out into moorland where sheep pulled at the thin grass in soft, dry rasps, unalarmed by intrusion.