by Tessa Harris
But the coppicer’s expression told him he had little choice.
“Whether you like it or not, Abel Smith, you are in this up to your neck.” He scowled, drawing his hands up under his chin. His words were delivered in a harsh, rasping whisper, so as not to arouse the attention of the other drinkers, but their meaning was plain. Whatever happened, they knew they must remain united in the face of their new enemy. Their livelihoods, and indeed their lives, depended on it.
Chapter 15
It was the night watchman, Walter Harker, who spotted them first. The curfew bell had sounded not an hour before, and he was patrolling the northern edge of the common later that same evening, when he saw something scurry toward the path. Guided by the light of his lantern, he was squinting into the darkness when he saw another shape darting across his view.
“Who goes there?” he called.
Before he received an answer, however, his eyes were drawn to a sudden flare of light, a bright cone aglow in the blackness. He was not sure how distant. All he knew was there was something ablaze.
Cupping his hands around his mouth, he began to yell. “Fire! Fire!”
Hearing Harker’s cry, Adam Diggott emerged from his cottage nearby, buckling his belt. “What goes on?” he called.
The night watchman twisted ’round. “Fire!” he replied, pointing to the flare. “Call for buckets and pails!” He switched back and saw two silhouettes running away from him. “You there! Stop!” he yelled. He gave chase, heading toward the fulling mill. “Stop!” he called again.
The commotion had woken the fuller, Bart Bailey, who now appeared at the upstairs window of his cottage. He saw the old man lumbering up the slope chasing two sprightly silhouettes. Barging outside in his nightshirt, he also gave chase. He was much faster than Harker and had almost caught up with the two runaways when they split, one veering off into the woods and the other disappearing down toward the river. He chose to pursue the latter and, in the darkness, heard his quarry slipping down the bank. A clatter of stones followed. There was a faint cry. Edging his way carefully along the gulley, his way lit by the full moon on the river, Bailey spotted movement up ahead.
Suddenly a noise came from behind. He turned to see his son, Charles. “There!” cried the youth, pointing, and bounding off down the riverbank. In a moment there was another cry and the sound of a scuffle. The fuller arrived just in time to see his son deliver a blow to the fugitive’s jaw.
“Hal Thornley!” cried Bailey in amazement. He rushed forward and helped heave the wretched youth up the bank. Bloodied and bowed, he had given up his fight.
Meanwhile, Walter Harker had been joined, then overtaken, by two men, leaner and fitter than he, who had entered the woods in pursuit of the second runaway. They brought with them dogs that quickly caught the scent and bounded over the bracken. Their prey was now in their sights. The men could see the branches snagging at the youth’s shirt as he zigzagged from tree to tree seeking cover. He jinked and tacked for a few minutes more, but he was no match for the hounds or their masters, who had gained much ground. Each second brought them closer, until moments later, there was a terrible wail and they saw their target drop like a stone to the ground. The dogs pounced and set about their quarry until their masters called them off.
“What’ve we ’ere?” asked the first man, lifting his lantern.
The light illuminated the crumpled face of a whimpering youth.
“Well, if it isn’t Jake Diggott,” he said above the noise of the barking hounds.
The boy was clasping his leg and rocking to and fro in pain. “For pity’s sake . . .” He pointed to his foot.
Peering down, the men could see that the boy’s boot was held in the grip of a gin trap, its iron jaws clamped around the toe cap.
“You’re lucky, boy,” said the first man, bending down. “Could’ve taken your foot off.” He sprung the trap’s mechanism open with the blade of his knife and pulled out Jake’s leg.
By this time Walter Harker had caught up. “You needs come with me, you young hooligan,” he panted.
Meanwhile at the foot of the slope leading up to Raven’s Wood, the fire still blazed. It was soon evident to anyone who bothered to investigate that it was the stack of fence posts that was alight. The flames leapt upward to the height of the weavers’ cottages. The timber made a fine bonfire and lit up the night sky, so that the inferno could also be seen from Boughton Hall. A party of riders was hastily dispatched. When they arrived, they expected to find the villagers in a human chain, passing pails of water down the line from the nearby river. They were, however, sorely disappointed. No one had lifted a finger to put out the conflagration. Besides, the fire had consumed almost all the stakes and posts by the time the Boughton men got to it, so they let the flames finish their feast undisturbed.
Both boys were consigned to the village lockup that night. Their action was sheer folly, most would agree, but they were not without their sympathizers. Some even brought them drink and crusts of bread to ease their discomfort. Passing them through the narrow grille in the door, they offered words of comfort, sometimes even praise. “You did good, lads,” some said. “Brave coves!” lauded others. Someone even gave up a blanket for the delinquents to share.
Jake’s mother, Rachel, brought his coat. Pressing it through the bars, she peered at her son with tears running down her cheeks. She was a woman who wore her worries on her face. Her forehead was creased by a frown line, and crow’s-feet fanned out from her eyes.
“Why?” she asked him, shaking her head. “You know you’ll be punished for this. There’ll be no getting off this time. Why?” Her voice dissolved into sobs.
Of course she needed no answer. She knew why. Every commoner understood the boys’ motives and admired them, either overtly or secretly. While each youth blamed the other for their capture, both also took pride in the outcome of their escapade. A day in the pillory would be worth it, they told themselves.
Chapter 16
Thomas was in turmoil. Safely back in his laboratory, he did not know where next to turn. He thought about engaging a specialist in the new field of mental health, Dr. William Battie or John Monro, to prove that Lydia was completely sane. Yet, even if King George himself ruled that she should be released, he was sure Sir Montagu would find some way of circumventing a royal command. He thought, too, about organizing her escape. He could disguise her, smuggle her out in a laundry basket, employ any number of ludicrous ruses. And until he could marshal his thoughts coherently, they would remain just that, preposterous flights of fancy that had no hope of success.
For the moment, he would turn his attention to Mr. Turgoose’s murder. Sir Theodisius was relying on him to solve the ghastly crime. At least ensconced in his own laboratory, he felt partly cushioned against the rigors of the outside world. Here were logic and order, reason and science. Here it was possible to reduce things to their component parts, to analyze, to dissect, to strip down compounds to their basic elements, to distill the essence of liquids, to deconstruct nature in all its forms.
Opening his case, Thomas took out the notes he had dictated to Professor Hascher during the postmortem on Jeffrey Turgoose and the ones he had made immediately afterward. As he did so, he noticed the glass phial containing the sample from the murder scene. Walking to the window, he held it up to the remaining light. Inside there was less than a salt spoon of gritty black powder. He had a good idea what it might be, but until he conducted tests on the substance, his mind would remain open. Nor did he know just what significance, if any, it bore to his investigation. He was certain, however, that it might be evidence. He set to work.
Unplugging the phial, he sniffed its contents. The tang of carbon stung his nostrils. He suspected that his initial thoughts, that this was some woodland fungus, were misplaced. This strange substance smelled and looked like soot. But if that were the case, how did it come to be in the middle of the wood, and so far from any charcoal kiln? He would test for it.
Firs
t he heated a small quantity of potassium nitrate in a flask on the trivet in the fireplace; then he added the grains of black powder. Sure enough they instantly began to dance inside the flask as the carbon reacted with the oxygen liberated by the chemical addition. The grains were most certainly charcoal, but how did they come to be sprinkled on a holly bush in the middle of a wood? Moreover, was this soot in some way connected to Turgoose’s murder? There was no escaping it. The deeper he pried, the more unexpected his findings. His heart sank with the realization that in order to solve the murder, he would have to return to the scene of the crime. He needed to go back to Brandwick and to Raven’s Wood.
Unfortunately for Jake Diggott and Hal Thornley, the Brandwick parish magistrate, Sir Arthur Warbeck, did not share the view of the commoners that the boys’ act of arson was foolhardy rather than criminal. Nor did he regard setting fire to Boughton’s fence posts as a childish prank. It was, in his judgment, a willful act of vandalism against the property of the Boughton Estate. At the assizes he sentenced Thornley to twenty-four hours in the pillory, but Diggott, whom he considered the mastermind behind the blaze, he ordered to be publicly whipped through the streets of Brandwick.
There were gasps in the gallery at the pronouncement. Rachel Diggott nearly fainted and had to be eased to her seat. Other women screamed that the boy was but thirteen years old. Adam Diggott swayed and grasped the wooden rail in front of him. But sentence had been passed. The following day it was carried out.
The pillory stood near the market cross in the center of Brandwick. In the past few months, it had been the preserve of the usual drunkards and ne’er-do-wells. The nature of their sojourn, although never enjoyable, depended largely on the villagers’ generosity. Abe Diggott had spent the odd day clapped in the pillory for making a nuisance of himself when drunk on his usual tipple, and barely anyone bothered to toss a rotten tomato at him. When Josh Thornley broke his wife’s jaw, however, it was a different matter. The women of Brandwick showed solidarity with their injured sister and pelted the culprit with rotten eggs and the refuse from the local slaughterhouse. The reek stayed around the village for the next few days.
Now it was Hal Thornley’s turn to be cuffed and collared and to feel the yoke of the heavy beam bear down on his young neck. His wrists were secured and he was forced to stand, back bent, beside the market cross for all to see. Over the next day and night he would endure not just what the weather decided to throw at him, but what the villagers chose to hurl at him, too. He was not well liked in Brandwick, but even his worst enemies had to admire him for his plucky spirit. They did not, however, like the fact that he had played the innocent. He had been, he told the magistrate, encouraged by Jake Diggott—dragooned, coerced, and bullied by the coppicer’s son into setting light to the woodpile. So as he stood in the pillory, oaths and curses were shouted at him, followed by the odd worm-eaten apple or pail of slops. But this humiliating consequence seemed as a carnival compared with Jake Diggott’s fate.
At a few minutes before midday, the tramp of feet marching in time could be heard at the top end of Brandwick’s High Street. A small platoon of militiamen had gathered to escort a cart, flanked by several outriders, toward the market cross. Bringing up the rear of the procession was the magistrate’s carriage. Sir Arthur Warbeck, bedizened in all his judicial finery, was accompanied by Sir Montagu Malthus, glowering at the crowd from beneath hooded eyes. They had come to see the deed done. They did not have to wait long.
In the cart sat young Diggott, caged like an animal. The conveyance drew up at the market cross amid jeers and angry jibes from the crowd, directed at the militiamen. As they let the side down, the boy was pulled to his feet. His lips quivered at the command to step down, and the rope that bound his hands was jerked sharply, so that he fell forward and stumbled onto the cobbles. The executioner, come all the way from Oxford to perform the task, now leered over him and stripped him of his shirt. Without any covering, his ribs showing through his pale skin, the boy looked even more vulnerable. The executioner shoved him forward and tied his hands to the cart’s tail. Through stinging tears, Jake searched in the crowd for his mother and father, and when he found them, he called to them. When they surged forward, however, the militiamen pushed them back roughly, leaving Rachel Diggott distraught. Adam Diggott, on the other hand, became violent. He started to thrash around, so that Zeb Godson and Will Ketch had to press upon him hard and tell him not to be foolish, unless he, too, wanted a good lashing.
The whole village had turned out to watch, not to rejoice in the grisly spectacle, not to take their macabre delight in the sight, but to support the boy as he began the ascent to his very own Calvary. He was to be whipped all along the High Street and out toward Raven’s Wood, where the charred remains of the timbers he had burned served as a blackened reminder of his crime.
Silence fell upon the crowd as the executioner swung back his arm for the first strike. The whip sliced through the still air and seared the youth’s skin with a long laceration. He let out a cry, followed by another and another each time the cowhide carved through his young flesh. No count was kept of the number of times the whip lashed, but the boy’s anguish lasted a full two hundred yards. The loud lamentations of some of the women, his mother’s included, only added to the agonizing chant.
When at last they released Jake Diggott from the cart tail, he fell to the ground like a heap of bloodied meat, his back cut to shreds. Some of the womenfolk hurried forward. Released by his anxious friends, Adam Diggott rushed toward the boy, too. Bending low, he looked in horror for a moment at the crimson fretwork of vicious cuts that crisscrossed his son’s back. Then he lifted Jake’s puckered face to his. Wiping away the boy’s tears with his thumb, his father vowed there and then to avenge his suffering.
“They’ll pay for what they’ve done to you, son,” he growled. “By God, they will.”
Chapter 17
Thomas did not return to Brandwick village straightaway. Leaving London the previous day, he had stayed once more in Amersham. On the last leg of his journey he had turned off the Oxford road and headed up to Raven’s Wood. He wanted to investigate not only the scene of the murder but the old ruins, too. He had been musing on the lights he had seen the other night from his window in the Three Tuns and wished to pursue a new line of inquiry. Perhaps, he told himself, there was a connection between illicit activities in the wood and the surveyor’s murder. Until and unless he was able to speak with the surveyor’s assistant, James Charlton, and he very much doubted he ever would, he would have to rely on his own intuition.
The steep slope was laced with a fretwork of pathways, well used by men, horses, and carts. During the day parts of the woodland were busy with the sound of industry—the crackle of wood burning in the charcoal kilns or the rasping of the sawyers’ saws. In his native homeland of Pennsylvania, man held the vast expanses of forest that covered the landscape in awe. Here, however, it seemed that Englishmen had the desire to tame nature and make it their own. Its riches were commodities to be traded. In their eyes every oak was a ship’s timber, every elm a dining table, every walnut tree a chest of drawers.
As he pressed on, he suddenly became aware of a low droning sound and realized it was the rush of fast-flowing water that filled his ears. He could not see the river. It was still obscured by the trees, but he could hear it. It drew him toward it. Making his way nearer the gushing rumble, he soon came to the edge of a steep cliff. It gave him a magnificent view: He could see the river as it tumbled down from the highest point in the forest, cutting its way through a shallow gorge. Pulling up his horse, Thomas peered down. The water was still high after the winter snowmelt. It powered the fulling mill at the head of the valley. The sight lifted his spirits a little, until he remembered that when the woods were fenced off it would no longer be available to all. He turned his horse.
Along the forest path he went, his mind still mired down in the resentment he felt toward Lupton. The beauty of the woodland seemed to be
fading the deeper he went. Oaks and beeches and poplars gave way to more firs, their dark, brooding towers masking the sun. Suddenly he became aware of a change in the dappling of the light to his right. Looking ’round he saw the ruins of an old manor house. He recalled that Lydia had spoken of it, telling him that it once acted as a garrison for Oliver Cromwell’s troops in the civil war more than one hundred and fifty years before. She said it had suffered severe damage at the time and had fallen into disrepair. The villagers had helped themselves to most of the stone and wood, crawling over it like busy ants, to build their own homes. Now all that remained was a ghostly footprint on the landscape. Here and there a jagged column might remain, like a stubborn tooth rooted so deep that it refused to budge. A mullioned casement was draped with swathes of ivy and framed a view of coppiced trees. There was a melancholy grace and beauty about it. He suddenly thought of Boughton Hall. Without Lydia, he only hoped it would not suffer the same fate.
He rode up to the ruin and tethered his horse to a young tree that had grown at an angle through a broken window. He had little idea of his bearings and he wondered how far from the murder scene he might be. Nevertheless, for now, he felt it of little consequence. This had to be one of the highest points in the wood, and if lights had been lit here, he may well have seen them from his room at the inn. He began to scrutinize the area for signs of recent human activity. Working methodically, he decided to examine within a twenty-yard radius of the ruin. With his eyes fixed firmly to the ground, he started to pace the circumference. In less than half an hour he had moved to within a yard of the curtilage of the old manor, and it was there, on the mossy earth, that he spotted the odd flakes, spilled near the outer wall. He bent down and picked up some of the strange brown fragments. They appeared to be shredded leaves, but it was only when he smelled them that he realized what they were.