Killing's Reward

by Andrew Wareham

  There was no alternative – he must go.

  The weather turned against Samuel – a series of wet, windy days that kept him indoors and well-wrapped up against the draughts. He was not to venture out in such conditions, he might catch a cold. It was almost a week before he was able to ride out in comfort and traverse the road along the river from Leek to his new pit.

  There was a narrow, rutted farm track which led up the valley side nearly a quarter of a mile to Young’s small and ancient farmhouse, little more than a thatched cottage huddled under the rise of the moorland to the west of the river. The track was open, no hedge to give cover, and there was a wet ditch running by its side, easy to slip into in a dark night. Samuel reined in and stared across to the hillside, trying to pick out any pathway there. He could just pick out a trace in the turf, winding its way up over the shoulder of the moorland, taking a more direct line to the village for the man afoot. A wagon going to market must follow the road, but a man going to the beerhouse would use the footpath.

  Samuel rode the two miles round on the flat to find the village and the end of the track, spotted both easily, the public house convenient to the footpath. He turned about and made his way to the pit and Bragg, spent a useful hour discussing his progress.

  “What’s the little village over the top, Mr Bragg? Not much more than a hamlet – a single pub and a dozen houses, maybe.”

  “The village of Consall, Mr Heythorne. Not much of a place but handy to the farmers along the valley, for brewing a good pint. Never been there myself, for it’s not for me to be showing myself in a low beerhouse, but I’m told it is none so bad for what it is.”

  The footpath offered a possible route to Young’s back door, but it was exposed on the hillside and strangers would be rare in the tiny village. A man on horseback must attract attention and he could hardly ride across and put up his horse and remain unnoticed. The more he thought of that, the less sensible it seemed. Reaching Farmer Young’s house in the night was hardly practical, so he must go to him in daylight, or persuade him to present himself elsewhere.

  If Young had cows in milk, then he would have to attend to them early in the morning, but his wife was dead and milking was a job for the womenfolk as was working in the creamery if he had such. The odds were that he would have sold off his milch cattle.

  The one certainty was that every farmer would attend the monthly market in Cheadle – unaccompanied by his sons, he would not want them to waste their time and his money. The boys would be put to a task before he left, hoeing or cutting firewood most likely, and the old man would take his cart in with anything he had to sell. He would be on the road good and early – farmers never went late to market for not wanting to be known to their neighbours as slugabeds and bad husbandmen.

  Samuel turned his mind to Bragg’s exposition of all he had done in the previous few days.

  “The shaft, Mr Heythorne, is down to twenty foot already, do you see?”

  There was a hole in the ground some ten feet on a side, a large windlass across the top and men down below, filling a yard-wide bucket on a thick rope with the rock they were cutting out.

  “No use as a building stone for the terraces, Mr Heythorne, more’s the pity, but handy for laying out the pithead and making a footing for the trackway that will be laid very soon.”

  There was a strong reminder in Bragg’s voice that the trackway was an essential.

  Samuel watched as two youths, little more than boys, wound the bucket up to the gallows that straddled the shaft and then swung it across to empty onto one of a pair of low four-wheeled drays.

  “Two buckets to a dray, Mr Heythorne. If so be there is no empty waiting, they tip onto the spoil heap to the side.”

  Another lad brought a pair of donkeys across and hitched them up and prodded them into movement. He pointed the dray downhill and sat on the brake so it should not overrun the slow pair.

  “Their work is mostly in bringing the empty back uphill, Mr Heythorne. That’s why we can use donkeys rather than horses, being on the hillside.”

  “Convenient that the shaft cuts through hard rock, Mr Bragg. You must use less of timber shoring as a result.”

  Bragg nodded in pleasure – the shaft was far cheaper than he had feared might be the case.

  “When is market day in Cheadle, Mr Bragg?”

  “Tuesday of next week, Mr Heythorne.”

  Samuel made his polite farewells to Bragg – too important an employee to be treated as a mere hand. He turned the horse’s head towards Cheadle, seeking a point of vantage on the road, discovering four separate places where the track took sharp turns up or downhill by the river for a few yards. He rode off towards Stoke and then took farm tracks to bring himself back unnoticed to Leek where he sat in his office and pondered how best to bring Famer Young’s troubling to an end.

  It would be simple to lay up for the man and shoot him, but that would instantly raise the question of who might desire the farmer’s death. The answer was obvious and even if nothing could be proved, which was likely, Samuel would find his reputation sullied, the more so when he attempted to buy-out Young’s sons.

  The man had to die accidentally.

  Accidents were not easy to arrange.

  If Farmer Young’s cart was found, slipped off the road, a wheel broken where it had hit rock, it would be unsurprising for his body to be discovered head down in the river. Bruises where he had been kicked by a panicking horse would be likely enough. A corpse smelling of booze and a half-empty gin bottle to his side would help as well – widowers often turned to the drink. The sons might deny that their father was a drunkard, but who would believe them?

  The need then was to waylay Young at the correct place and, provided there was no witness in sight, belt him over the head and arrange all as was necessary. Easy to stop a cart on the narrow road in the early morning, he told himself… then he thought again, would he stop if he was accosted on the highway?

  Long consideration said that he must be sure of bringing Young to a halt and that could not be done simply by speaking to him, by calling him to stop.

  Tuesday morning saw Samuel leaving the house while it was still dark, very early in the morning, to the surprise of the servants. They would not speak to outsiders about his business, Samuel knew, as he nodded to the maid who held the door for him.

  His horse was inclined to be indignant at having its sleep disturbed; Samuel had some slight sympathy for the beast as he huddled in his riding coat – even in summer, it was chilly first thing in the morning.

  An hour brought him to the first secluded bend in the track. He tucked the horse away with a nosebag on the far side of the track, settled himself in cover close to the river, in rocks within ten feet of where a cart must pass. The river ran shallow but fast over stony rapids and the bank was a good four feet high, sufficient to provide a fatal fall, headfirst. There had been no rain for three days, the track fairly dry. He heard a cart coming nearly a quarter of a mile away in the quiet dawn, peered out through the low grasses and brambles growing sparsely in the rocks. It was a two-horse, four-wheeled wagon; Young possessed a one-horse cart with two wheels.

  He huddled back, hoping to be unobserved. He had already planned if challenged to claim that he’d been taken short, and had to leave his horse and move his bowels by the riverside. It was sufficiently ordinary that none would object; nor would they hang about in the vicinity – if he had a dysentery, he could keep it to himself.

  The wagon rattled by, the driver hunched over his reins, looking neither left nor right.

  One of the other farmers along the valley, Samuel presumed.

  Five minutes and there was another cart, this one of the right size. He had brought a heavy stick with him, clutched it firm in his right hand, drew a pistol with the left. He peered through the dawn light, saw the right face.

  He stepped forward as the cart came level with him, thrusting the pistol forward, no more than a yard from Young’s face as he started up fro
m his seat.

  “What the bloody hell…”

  He was cut off short by the cudgel whacking him across the head. He fell forward, stunned, rolling to the ground as the horse panicked and leapt forward smashing the near wheel into a projecting rock on the bend, ideally for Samuel’s purpose. The cart jammed up and held the horse in its shafts; the animal panicked even further and kicked out behind it, smashing timbers and giving even more credence to the accident.

  Samuel hauled Young, virtually unconscious, to the river bank, hit him again cleanly on the temple and then pulled him down the bank, head in the water and taking care to snag a leg in the bushes so that he would not float away. He wanted everything neat and tidy. Finally he pulled out a gin bottle and soaked the heavy coat Young was wearing before smashing it on the ground beside the cart.

  He stepped back, the evidence clear – Young was drunk, had allowed the horse to go too fast to the bend, had smashed a wheel and been thrown off the cart, hitting his head. Drunk and concussed, he had staggered forward, caught his feet in brambles and fallen head-first into the river.

  Samuel rode off quietly, leaving the road and riding up to the pit for an early inspection before going about his other business. He joined Bragg at the little hut he had built as a temporary base at the mine, talked easily with him for an hour before setting out towards Cheadle, intending to take a look at the market as he went into Stoke.

  The market was like any other - small farmers selling early vegetables off the tail of their carts; peddlers and tinkers offering brooms and baskets and pewterware; farmwives with dozens of eggs; a few with live chicken; a single table with cheeses on offer; one cloth merchant who did the rounds with bolts and lengths of woollens and linen and a few cottons. The smith had a row of hatchets and hoes and rakes and shovels in front of him and a wooden box of sewing needles, expensive and hard to come by, coveted by housewives who had to make-do with hand-carved wooden darners.

  Samuel made a play of talking to the smith, being seen to be present and innocuous.

  “I am opening a new pit, and possibly a foundry as well, Master Smith. My name is Mr Samuel Heythorne.”

  “I did hear you were opening the seam on the higher hillside, Mr Heythorne.”

  “I am. I need a smith, a journeyman will do, to work for me there. Have you a young man who could move on? A cottage of his own and a wage besides and the freedom to work on his own commissions at the weekend if he so wished.”

  A large smithy would normally carry two apprentices and a journeyman who had served his time and was saving up to open his own place. There would be no room for another qualified apprentice to work as a journeyman and the smith would have to move the older man on before he could take on another boy. Parents might pay as much as twenty pounds in premium to a smith to take their son into his teaching; a new apprentice every three or four years made a handy extra in the smith’s pocket.

  “My oldest apprentice be just about at the end of his time, Mr Heythorne. Best he should work under my eye for his first twelvemonth. If so be Silas, which has three years as a journeyman under his belt, might fancy moving across to the pit, it might be convenient. Never going to set the world afire, young Silas, but he’s a capable lad so long as you tell him plain what you want. What did you say the wage was, Mr Heythorne?”

  “His cottage, as soon as we have it built. Three bedrooms, that will be, him being a tradesman not a simple pit hand. No rent to pay. Five and twenty shillings a week, starting off, for the first year. Five shillings more in each of the next three years to make him up to two pounds, while we are content with each other.”

  It was unlikely that the smith in a country town such as Cheadle would make as much as three pounds clear in a week. Samuel was offering good money for a journeyman.

  “I shall tell Silas of your offer, Mr Heythorne, and tell him too that it’s the best he’s likely to hear in a long time round here. If, maybe, he was to go down to London town, where all men are richer, so they tell me, he might do better there – but he won’t here.”

  “I think it is good money, Master Smith. Deliberately so – I want men who are happy to work for me and who will do a good job because of that. A hard-working smith will be of great use to the pit and I am pleased to offer a high wage to a young man who will earn it. Has he a wife, by the way? I prefer settled, married men as my employees.”

  “He ain’t got a missus yet, sir – but if so be he has a big cottage and a high wage, he won’t have much chance of staying single a lot longer!”

  Samuel laughed and agreed that to be likely. He walked on round the market, knowing he would have been seen and identified – foreigners being rare in the little town – and marked down as a man who was willing to talk to those lesser to him, and to laugh with them. He would be fixed in people’s minds as a good man.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Killing’s Reward

  Section Three - AD 1767

  Farmer Perry was cautious in his conversation with Samuel. His neighbour Young had died in an accident, but a most convenient happenstance from Mr Heythorne’s point of view. Deeply agricultural he might be, but that did not mean stupid – he was well capable of putting two and two together, so he believed.

  “Farmer Young’s boys be at a loose end, you might say, Mr Heythorne, for not knowing what to do. They ain’t truly sure of how to farm the land themselves and don’t see what else they can do for a living. While they got land, they ain’t going to be poor vagabonds with nothing; they grown up with the idea that the land makes them better men. Yet, Mr Heythorne, if they can’t work the land, it ain’t no use to ‘em. The elder of ‘em ain’t barely a grown man and the other be no more than a boy yet. Not old enough to set out on their own, you might say, lacking the strength to work from first light to last, what a small farmer must and not having the know of their father, neither.”

  It was clear to Samuel that if he were to buy the boys out, he must put them in the way of making a respectable living – he must offer them protection as well as money.

  “Do they have their letters, Farmer Perry?”

  “What, reading and that? Nay, what would good farm lads be wanting wi’ that sort of thing?”

  It was an unanswerable question.

  “It is difficult to find employment for boys who cannot read and write. They can be nothing more than the merest of labourers if they cannot handle paper.”

  “Wasn’t never going to need jobs, was they, Mr Heythorne? No need for a farmer’s sons to read.”

  It was not worth arguing – Farmer Perry was himself illiterate and no doubt his children were as well. They could not appreciate the value of literacy and lacked the money to buy books and the daylight hours to read them, for they could not afford candles.

  “They could go to sea, perhaps, Farmer Perry. Seamen in the nature of things do not read and write, or need not, at least. I have a business friend in Liverpool who could put them aboard ships in the African trade, which can pay a seaman one hundred pounds a year.”

  Farmer Perry grew his own wheat and barley and oats to feed his family, together with a field of potatoes and a garden of cabbages. He kept a sty of pigs as well as chickens. He and his wife and their son and two daughters ate within reason well. Besides that he sold at the market to see as much as fifteen pounds in cash in a year. The very idea of a man earning one hundred pounds every year was alien to him, and much to be commended.

  “Was they to sell their acres, Mr Heythorne, so as to have money in their pockets as well, the boys would be set up for life on that wage.”

  Samuel agreed, finding no reason to mention the fevers of the African shores which killed perhaps a half of the sailors who ventured there repeatedly. The African trade paid good money but only a few sailors settled back at home to enjoy it in their later years; the bulk of sailors who ventured to Africa in the Guineamen roistered away their pay, making the most of their short but merry lives.

  “Very true, Farmer Perry. A man who saile
d ten years in the trade would be able to put away seven or even eight hundred pounds – a fortune indeed. He could come back and buy the biggest store in Cheadle, and stock its shelves and still have money left to set up house with a plump wife. Still young and a leading man of the town.”

  Farmer Perry was amazed that more young men did not follow the course, but Samuel assured him that few were so go-ahead as to have heard of it. Theirs was not the most venturesome of parts, he thought.

  It was very true and should be amended – Farmer Perry thought he must mention the virtues of going to sea to others of his neighbours’ younger sons.

  “Do you come with me, Mr Heythorne, and we shall talk to the boys. Best thing is they sell to you and go off to this Liverpool place with you and board ship with money in their pockets and their fortunes to make. We can do no better for them than that!”

  The boys were at a loss. They had buried their father and did not know what to do – they took very little persuading. Farmer Perry was known to them, being their neighbour, and had a good name - they knew he would have their best interests in mind. Samuel was a stranger but was dressed as a gentleman and one who had money. Within the week they had made the land over to Samuel and accompanied him to Liverpool where Mr Hayes was easily able to put them aboard one of his ships to learn the seaman’s trade.

  Mr Hayes took Samuel to one side as he had the boys taken down to the dock where his sole ship in port lay waiting to make up her cargo.

  “Friends of your family, Mr Heythorne?”

  Samuel smiled and shook his head.

  “Inconvenient would be a better description, Mr Hayes. Orphans and in possession of a few acres that block the path a trackway from a new pit must follow. I have bought their land…”

  “And now they must make their fortunes at sea, of course, Mr Heythorne. Fear not, sir! A first voyage down to the Bight of Benin to settle them in, as one might say, and then I shall place them aboard a vessel of mine that sails out of Lancaster itself, working the run from Cape Coast Castle across to Jamaica, carrying servants for the fields there.”